Professional Documents
Culture Documents
“I Don’t Like the Blues.”: Stories of Memory, Race, and Regional Futures from the
Mississippi Delta
B. Brian Foster
A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in
partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the
Department of Sociology.
Chapel Hill
2017
Approved by:
Karolyn Tyson
Mosi Ifatunji
Marcus Hunter
Zandria Robinson
© 2017
B. Brian Foster
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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ABSTRACT
B. Brian Foster: “I Don’t Like the Blues.”: Stories of Memory, Race, and Regional Futures
from the Mississippi Delta
(Under the direction of Karolyn Tyson)
This dissertation is not about the blues—about the music’s origins in the Mississippi Delta,
or its evolution from field holler and work song to Bessie Smith and B.B. King. I do not wish,
here, to chronicle or update the record on black American music preferences, and I draw
few references to the blues lyric tradition. Rather, this dissertation positions the blues as
muse and metaphor; indeed, as an interpretive framework for understanding the racial
attitudes, placemaking logics, and folk epistemologies of black southerners in the post-Civil
Rights Mississippi Delta. Extending the findings of existent commentary citing the social
and sociological capacities of black aesthetic cultures, I demonstrate that black Delta
communities imbue the blues with social, cultural, and historical, as well as aesthetic,
meaning. I find that while earlier generations embraced and embodied the blues to
navigate daily life in the Plantation and Jim Crow South, black southerners today are
and experience, and arena of regional futurism—and ultimately dispensing with it as they
negotiate the emergent realities of the post-Civil Rights Mississippi Delta. I argue that such
claims embody a broader way of seeing and negotiating the social world that minds the
enduring importance of the past while holding to a transformative vision for the present
and future. Indeed, the account offered here, logged during two years of ethnographic
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fieldwork in Clarksdale, Mississippi, straddles, blurs, and crosses boundaries between
remembering and reckoning, vigilance and aspiration, front porches and back roads, New
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To all them people and all that time, still making the Country South.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Daddy used to lecture my brother and I all the time. “Use three hands if you ain’t got
nothing but two,” a demand that struck me as odd. It was never quite suitable for the
moment, and it always seemed to come from a place of frustration and impatience. Daddy
died a while back, but I still hear his words clearly. “Use three hands.” Now, though, I like to
imagine them—Daddy and his words—not merely as the fruit of dissatisfaction, but also as
a show of remarkable belief. “Use three hands,” a call to do that which seems beyond the
scope of human possibility, a demand to yield to the forces of will and imagination.
I did much of this work in isolation, holed away in my office or some darkened
corner of wherever I happened to be, with Big K.R.I.T. instrumentals in the background.
And, I am grateful for those moments, that darkness and solitude (and Big K.R.I.T.). But,
what I know for sure is that I—and this work—would not have made it through without
Ifatunji, Zandria Robinson, and Marcus Hunter—thank you. You made me better. You made
this work better. You were patient. You were thoughtful. You were critical. Most
importantly, though, you recognized that I wanted to tell a certain kind of story in a certain
vi
kind of way, and even when I was unclear on both the story and the way, you allowed me
space to figure it out. That is cause for thanks of the highest order.
To the numerous organizations and institutions that provided financial support for
this work, thank you. In particular, thanks to the National Science Foundation (Grant No.
Cohort 42), and the Graduate School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
(UNC). Special thanks are also due to Kathy Wood and the Initiative for Minority Excellence
at UNC.
To the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Center for the Study of
Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, thank you. Transitioning to a job while
outweighed the patience, support, and guidance of my colleagues. Especial thanks to Drs.
Kirsten Dellinger, Ted Ownby, Kirk Johnson, Willa Johnson, and James “JT” Thomas.
To Dr. Robert Reece. You read more drafts of more parts of this thing than anyone.
Thank you for your timely, focused, thoughtful, nuanced feedback. Like you always say, “we
in this together.” Like we used to always joke about saying, “we made it.” To Dr. Allison
Mathews, Joey Brown (the “country scholar”), Kimber Thomas, Dr. Willie Wright, and Mia
Keeys, y’all really are the ancestors living and breathing. I am fortunate to know you and
fortunate still more to have shared in and benefitted from your brilliance.
To Blake Foster, Tiffany Mayfield, Nicky Woods, Princeton Echols, Travis McGowan,
Jonathan Nevol, Carlos Wilson, Derrick Bledsoe, Savannah Trice, Tieryaa Metcalf, Tamzen
Jenkins, Lorenzo Hopper, Dr. Enoch Claude, Dr. Steven Harris, Dr. Rufai Ibrahim, Felicia
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Arriaga, and a legion of others, thank you for being family, for letting me be distant when I
To two vanguard black women—Jazmine “The King of the South” Walker and Amber
“The High Priestest of Black Joy” Phillips—your work on The Black Joy Mixtape saved me.
It’s easy to forget to be whole and human in this thing sometimes, to see beyond the gaze
Achievement Program at the University of Mississippi, thank you for pushing (and
sometimes pulling) me to this point. I needed you. We need you. They need you too.
To the late Dr. Jesse Scott. I have kept all those papers from your senior capstone
course. I revisit your written comments often. I still read Baker and Shelby and Iton. You
were a force. I miss you. We miss you. They should miss you too.
To momma, you know I did much of this work at your house, sitting on one of the
“good chairs” in the dining room, often with daddy’s favorite Bobby Bland record in the
background. You always told me, “just do what you have to do to get it done.” You didn’t
really know what I needed to do, or what it might look like to get it done. That did not
matter. You let me cry—you let me be whole and human—by myself but next to you. That
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PREFACE
journal on my first night in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Exactly what I could say, and how it
might be beautiful, I was not entirely sure. Still, I wanted to say something beautiful, to
write the thing that I had wanted and needed to read but could not find, a monograph
about black folks whose lives played out in “the country”—not Chicago, not New York City,
not Atlanta, but the country. I wanted to write about race and inequality in and from a place
at the bottom of the margins: the Mississippi Delta. I wanted to give a retrospective on a
place long thought to be left behind, to tell about how the people there were striving
forward, bearing hopes and dreams for the future. I knew they were striving. I knew they
were striving forward because I had read—Zora and Zandria, Richard Wright and Raised
Up Down Yonder. I knew they were striving forward because I had lived—most of my life in
a little country town in Mississippi, about 120 miles East of that unfamiliar place where I
Two years later: the story that emerged was disappointing—maybe there are better
words, but for now disappointing, which isn’t to say that it was surprising. It wasn’t
surprising because I had read—the Census and Clyde Woods—and found what they had
foretold: arrested development; limited opportunity; and big mansions with big yards in
the distance. I saw in plain sight the persistence of the colorline, which followed, ballast-
for-ballast and mile-for mile, the tracks of the Illinois Central Railroad,
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literally and figuratively splitting the town in two.
Yet, I also found, as Zora once urged us to see, black folks leading ordinary lives. In
the summertime, people liked to be outside. Children laughed and played like children do,
with boundless energy and wide smiles, jumping in and over ditches, riding bikes, waving
sticks, throwing balls through all manner of hoops. Women and men worked long days,
cursed and went to church, drank beer, smoked weed, and played dominos on all manner of
tabletops. Folks washed and fixed on cars, sat and cursed on porches, sweated and laughed
on the backs of pickup trucks with their shirts off. In the fall months, they went to football
games, raucous basketball gyms in winter, a holiday parade at Christmas time, somebody’s
dinner table on Sundays. They lit candles, released balloons, and sang elegies for lost loved
ones and neighbors. They fought, married, lived, died, and had birthday parties.
I found more of the same—the expected and ordinary—among the 300 or so people
that I met, nearly half of whom I spoke with on the record. I heard stories of Civil Rights
workers and Freedom Houses, Gangster Disciples and Vice Lords, guns, drugs, and dead
bodies by the river. People talked about God and church, and reveled in their wildest
dreams. They bemoaned politicians and sometimes other residents. They celebrated each
other with laughter and flowers. Men bragged about sex and cars and their mommas.
Women spoke of 100 days of peace. People sang to me, rapped their best freestyle verses to
me, shared profoundly personal stories with me. They invited me into their homes,
welcoming me with chicken and cheap liquor, “shit talking,” and more love and trust than I
What I did not expect; indeed, what ended up taking months for me to “find” was
what and how much residents had to say about the blues. Of course, I had read folktales
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about Robert Johnson cutting deals with the devil at Clarksdale’s “crossroads.” I knew of
Red’s and the Juke Joint Festival, and I had heard that Morgan Freeman owned a blues club
in the area, but I was largely uninterested. I did not necessarily like the blues. In my mind,
the thing that I wanted to write was “bigger,” “newer,” shinier and more extravagant than a
juke joint or blues show. I wanted to understand the contemporary South, even theorize
about the region’s future, not mine and fixate on the past. As I learned, amidst the expected
and among the ordinary, the blues plays perfectly for all of that—the past, the present, and
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
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LIST OF TABLES
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List of Figures
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Introduction: On the backbeat: Listening for the Blues (Epistemology)
“I don’t like the blues. It saddens me,” Doris King confesses without hesitation or
misgiving. While her demeanor has changed very little since I arrived to her office, a front-
corner room in King Memorial Funeral Home, here as she reflects on the Delta’s newest
blues revival, her tone grows dismissive, then quiet. “I guess I’ve never even been to a blues
show.” The pitch of her voice rises, as if she is surprised by her own response. “Never.”
I had long heard that Clarksdale was the “Birthplace of the Blues”—home of Muddy
Waters and the “Crossroads”; host to thousands of blues enthusiasts, festivalgoers, and
musicians each year; full with swaying juke joints. “What about Moonies?” I ask, recalling at
least a dozen recommendations, by tourists and locals alike, to visit the place known as
“I’ve been to Moonies,” she admits faintly. “I went last September. My cousin, they
gave him his 70th birthday party there, and I’ve eaten there—takeout.” In an instant, her
tone grows sullen. “I don’t understand it. The floor was crooked. The tablecloths were
Our conversation moves slowly, as Doris combs her 71-year-old memory for detail
after vivid detail—the most appropriate adjective, the correct pairing of first and last name,
the most illuminating story from her past. She recalls hiding in a local Freedom House
during the long summer of 1964 while her uncle sparred with white vigilantes nearby. She
1
mourns the loss of her husband, whom she remembers as “a beautiful and genuine person”
though he had “found God in a roundabout way.” She describes returning to Mississippi
after living in Baltimore for a time, her mother pursuing the promise of a postwar urban
manufacturing boom. “It was an experience,” she recalls. “This was such a strange place to
me.” She laughs then frowns scantly, both amused and befuddled at earlier memories of
“picking greens,” “sweeping the front yard,” and sweating through daylong church services,
all apparent rites of passage in what she called the “country South.”
Doris’s comments capture the spirit of dozens of other black residents of Clarksdale.
spades and domino games on summertime nights, or while walking among slot machines at
the nearby Isle of Capris Casino, black Clarksdalians explained and insisted that they did
not like the blues. Where they defined “blues” as a memory, it was a memory of a personal
experience that, while wrought with laughter and lessons, they had long left behind. When
they spoke of blues clubs and festivals, they referred to them as places “for the white folks
to go”; indeed, places imbued with a particular racial history and emergent racial meaning
that they wanted to avoid. Finally, where they had witnessed blues tourism become the
center of a new town revitalization agenda, it was an agenda all too familiar, a harbinger of
yet more unequal opportunity and “uneven development.” 1 I Don’t Like the Blues explores
1 This term is most closely associated with the writing of Leon Trotsky and Marxist development theory
(Ashman 2012; Smith 1984). In general, it refers to an emergent structural arrangement in which some
nations or regional blocks grow, modernize, and accumulate wealth at higher rates than others, resulting in
an unequal set of social and power relations. In some cases, less developed nations adopt or are subsumed
under the economic and cultural traditions of their more developed counterparts. In others, developed
nations exploit and seek conquest over their less developed counterparts. Woods (1998) adopts this term in
reference to the persistence and continued rule of the Plantation block in the Mississippi Delta throughout the
twenty-first century. I am deploying it here in a similar way—to reference the belief among residents that
local elected officials and public stakeholders were actively seeking to develop and improve white residents
of Clarksdale, ignoring local black communities.
2
what these sensibilities say about how black southerners view themselves; how they are
reconciling the Old (South) with the New (South), their personal testimonies with their
present circumstances; and how they are crafting for themselves a transformative vision
for the future. Indeed, present in the varied definitions and staid dislike that black
perspective on who they are and where they are, on their predicament, and on who is
Figure 1. Map of Mississippi, With Eleven “Central” Counties of the Mississippi Delta Notated
I Don’t Like the Blues is a study of Clarksdale, a Mississippi Delta town in the throes
of two related structural transformations. On one hand, an economic crisis has exacerbated
local unemployment and poverty rates, arrested access to even basic civic services, and
stay against the aforementioned “development crisis” (Woods 1998), state legislators and
local elected officials have employed a new economic development campaign centered on
blues and heritage tourism, building Clarksdale and a nearby cluster of towns into a
“circuit” of blues clubs, juke joints, heritage markers, and museums. Drawing on more than
two years of ethnographic fieldwork and nearly 150 unique interview and oral history
accounts, I Don’t Like the Blues examines how black residents of Clarksdale make sense of
and navigate the Delta’s historical and contemporary structural profile, focusing particular
attention on their views of the blues and the ongoing blues-centered economic
development plan.
3
The voices chronicled here straddle generational lines between Civil Rights and soul
(Lewis 2009; Neal 2002), between residents who are young enough to have witnessed
Clarksdale’s transition to the Post-Civil Rights era yet old enough to know what came
before. In particular, I center the perspectives of residents with either experiential or close
secondhand knowledge of daily life in Clarksdale during the years spanning 1964, when a
group of residents filed suit to admit Clarksdale High School’s first black student, Rebecca
Henry (Hamlin 2012), and the early 1970’s, when the city school district was implementing
a court-mandated desegregation plan. While focusing on this time period places the
analytic focus of I Don’t Like the Blues primarily in the purview of middle-aged and older
residents—most between 30 and 58 years old—this account is also accented by the voices
moved to Mississippi from Chicago in the 1990’s vividly recounts her infatuation with hill
country blues. The town’s 61-year-old white, millionaire, former state gubernatorial
candidate, attorney, businessman mayor gives voice to how local elected officials and
public stakeholders view Clarksdale’s blues. And, a 28-year-old native resident with a
Highway 61 emblem, flanked by the words “Born and Bred,” tattooed on his forearm
Continuing an analytic and interpretive tradition that recognizes the social and
sociological capacities of black aesthetic and performance cultures (Asante 2008; Ashe
2007; George 1988, 2005; Grazian 2004; Jones 1963; Neal 1998, 2002; Robinson 2014;
Rose 1994; Salaam 1995; Shevy 2008; Sigler and Balaji 2013; Van Deburg 1993), I theorize
that how black southerners navigate, draw meaning from, and develop systems of
knowledge and expectancy around their daily lived experience is legible in their
4
characterizations and appraisals of the blues. In particular, I am arguing that, like earlier
generations of black southerners, black residents of Clarksdale imbue the blues with social,
cultural, and historical, as well as aesthetic, meaning (Baker Jr. 1987; Ferris 2009; L. Jones
1963;D. Jones 2007; Mizelle Jr. 2014; Neal 1972; Palmer 1982; Salaam 1995). Yet, while
their predecessors birthed and embraced the blues in the shadows of the Peculiar
Institution (Jones 1963), and later generations expanded and revised the blues from the
margins of the Reconstruction and Jim Crow South (Woods 1998), black southerners today
meaning and experience, and arena to explore a type of regional futurism—and ultimately
dispensing with it as they negotiate the emergent realities of the post-Civil Rights
Mississippi Delta.
Doris King returned to Mississippi in 1963. In the fifty-plus years that followed, she
married, raised two sons, and assumed directorship of King, the family funeral home. As we
talk, her meter remains calm but deliberate, occasionally accompanied by an unflinching
glare, as if to assure me of her narrative authority, or perhaps to dare me to question it. She
describes the frenzied backlash of white residents in the years after Brown. “From First
Street to Riverton used to be white (see Figure 2), but I’ll say maybe three years of me
being back was when it was turning. Of course, Lee Academy was (getting) up and running
by then.” Doris alludes to a private K-12 academy, established in 1968 by white residents,
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in conjunction with the Mississippi Citizen’s Council Association (Hamlin 2012; Munford
1973), as Brown’s call for school integration trickled into the Delta.
“Have you seen that change at all since then?” I ask. “Since, like, the 1970’s, has it
“(Clarksdale) is segregated now, just like it was segregated then. It’s always go’n be
set up that way.” Doris sits still, unmoved by the apparent timelessness of Clarksdale’s
colorline, both symbolic and actual. “Right across the railroad tracks, there, was all white.”
She gestures towards the small window in her office, referencing the downtown square a
few blocks away. King Memorial is located in what residents refer to variably as
neighborhood separated from the Clarksdale’s downtown square by history and the tracks
of the Illinois Central Railroad. “Downtown was for the whites.” She repeats herself firmly.
More recently, Doris remembers watching as scores of residents, many of them her
neighbors and friends, moved from Clarksdale to “find better living.” Those who stayed
population loss, unprecedented industrial loss and economic contraction. In time, they saw
particular, beginning in the late 1970’s, while residents and industry fled Clarksdale in
droves, the downtown square filled with blues clubs, juke joints, and novelty shops; the
Delta Blues Museum and other preservation sites opened; and an expansive slate of blues
festivals attracted throngs of tourists to the area (King 2011). Couched in two national
cultural revivals—one surrounding blues music (Jones 2007; King 2004, 2011; Titon 1998;
Wald 2004), the other cultural- and ecotourism (Henshall 2012; Jones 2007; Rojek and
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Urry 1997)—the local blues renaissance was meant to bolster the town’s civic and
“I believe what Clarksdale is trying to do [with the blues revival], is that the white
folks are trying to get back in control…Look at the downtown. You know the song, ‘How I
Got Over’?” Doris does not wait for me to answer. “Well, too many of us been trying to get
over for all these years, and they just don’t wan’a see that. Seem like they just want control
over everything.” She smiles inwardly. “You know, white people are strange like that.”
Doris worries that despite the blues revival, Clarksdale will soon follow the path of
another town in the Mississippi Delta. “Look at Murs Hill,” she suggests, her voice landing
just above a whisper. “People have some beautiful homes there, but they don’t have a store,
they can’t start a business, they can’t get nothing going. They don’t even have a decent
restaurant. Then, if you look at Clarksdale, the blues just won’t keep us standing.”
Clarksdale are confronting a changing demographic and economic landscape while also
negotiating memories and structural holdovers from the past. They worry over the ongoing
loss of residents and industry, even as they note the familiar look and feel of Old South
racism. They measure the possibility of change in Clarksdale—the notion that new industry
will come, that black communities will have a fair chance at social mobility, nay economic
stability—even as they maintain a vigilant awareness of the region’s past setbacks and the
stubbornness of plantation-era power relations. They live amidst the scenes and sounds of
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an ongoing blues revival, while doubting its long-term viability, while recognizing it as
merely another domain for white elected officials and stakeholders to exact power and
exploit black communities. I situate these tensions, between New South and Old, between
the looming shadow of the region’s past and the aspirations that black residents express
regarding its future, within the analytic and interpretive parameters of the “blues
formalized slavery and witness to the region’s transition from Plantation to debt peonage
to disenfranchisement.
The genealogy of the blues epistemology (tradition) begins, like blues music itself3,
in the plunder and violence of plantation life in the rural South. In particular, Woods
(1998) argues that as the Delta’s southern planter class worked to reinscribe its social and
economic dominance in the wake of Emancipation and a farming economy in flux, poor and
working-class black communities in the region created their own system of “social
explanation and social action” (p. 29), what he called a blues epistemology. Here, Woods
was codifying an extensive tradition of empirical and literary work that had imagined the
2 Woods (1998) offers two definitions of the Reconstruction Generation. First, he uses the moniker to refer to
the “two generations" of black southerners that “witnessed the overthrow of slavery, ten years of freedom,
and the overthrow of Reconstruction and the beginning of ninety-five years of what has been called the
‘Second Slavery,’ namely disenfranchisement, debt peonage, Jim Crow, and legally sanctioned official and
private terrorism” (p. 17). He also draws on the term to reference black southerners “berthing themselves
sometime between the end of formal slavery and the turn of the century” (p. 19). Thus, we might loosely say
that the Reconstruction Generation includes black southerners born between 1863 and 1900.
3 Most conventional accounts locate the “origins” of the Blues Music in the Mississippi Delta, Coahoma County
and Clarksdale in particular. The two most common citations here include a reference to “negro music” in a
set of field notes recorded by Harvard archaeologist Charles Peabody (1903) and a W.C. Handy’s (1991)
recollections of a “lean, loose-jointed Negro” (p. 74) playing the “weirdest music” he had ever heard at a rail
station in Tutwiler, Mississippi. Palmer (1982) offers what appears to be the best-sourced account of this, the
most standard, blues origin story. Wald (2004) effectively argues for a more complicated origins story.
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blues aesthetic—“riffs” and “rhythms,” tonal “flourishes,” “improvisation,” the playing of
“blue notes”—as an interpretive metaphor for black life (Brown 1932; Campbell 1995;
Hurston 1942, 2011; Jones 1963; Neal 1972; Powell 1989; Salaam 1995; Wright 1937). The
blues epistemology was the resilience and resistance of enslaved black families as they
survived, and often thrived, amidst “constant attacks by the plantation bloc and its allies”
(Woods 1998: 30). It was the “fantastic” (Iton 2008) of black women and men “fusing
dream worlds and everyday practices” (p. 16) to “make” (Hunter et al. 2016) new places
for themselves under the old shadows of lynching trees and Jim Crow. It was the ingenuity
of a people who followed the stars and railroads to freedom and new possibilities.
I Don’t Like the Blues extends the temporal parameters of the blues epistemology to
the post-Civil Rights South, in particular to the changing demographic, economic, and
political landscape of the region’s rural communities. Thus, if the blues emerged as the
cultural backdrop of rural, southern life during an earlier period in the region’s history, in
particular the 35 years spanning Emancipation, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow, this account
explores what that backdrop looks like now. If the blues was the soundtrack of the
Reconstruction Generation, pulsing and thumping with their defiant cries, this account
“listens” for how that soundtrack might have changed with the times. Indeed, if the blues
epistemology was crafted and carried out against the “chaotic and deadly” (Woods 1998:
20) machinations of the Plantation System, this account chronicles what black southerners
in the rural south are making and doing now, still in the shadow of the plantation though
more than 100 years after freedom. To address these questions, I rely on the accounts of
black southerners themselves—not a select group of blueswomen and men (e.g., Woods
1998), not the blues lyric tradition (e.g., Jones 1963), not theoretical and historical
9
postulations about what the blues is and is not (e.g., Jones 2007). Here, I am (re)asserting
the status of black southerners like Doris as the region’s craftiest and most sophisticated
language and customs, (and) summoners of life, love, laugher, and much, much more”
(Woods 1998:17). The resulting account straddles, blurs, and crosses the boundaries of
It is worth noting, now and no later, that the impulse to frame this as a story of “not
liking the blues”—as opposed to, say, “loving southern soul,” “needing gospel,” or “bumping
Big K.R.I.T.”—is driven by the voices and sensibilities of the nearly 150 residents of
Clarksdale and rural Coahoma County that I spoke with. While I heard these latter
pronouncements occasionally, both in passing and during extended conversations, I was far
Doris King’s leading confession. Residents insisted on dismissing the blues—almost always
before, and typically instead of, speaking of their affinities for other music forms. They
integrated references to the blues offhandedly when discussing any number of topics,
10
whether a difficult experience from earlier in their life or amidst drinks and barbecue in
summer. They responded to my directed questions about blues music and the ongoing
blues revival with assurance and detail. Indeed, there was something about the blues,
above and beyond other expressive forms, that resonated among the black Clarksdalians
that I spoke with, even if this resonance manifested as dislike, disengagement, and
avoidance.
To be sure, the salience of the blues in the individual and collective consciousness of
black Delta communities like those in Clarksdale is partly rooted in the heavy prevalence of
blues symbolism, heritage sites, and performance cultures in the region. The Delta is widely
referred to as the “Land of the Blues,” and the region boasts a robust, if contrived and
quirky, arrangement of blues clubs, juke joints, heritage markers, historical collections, and
commemorative sites (Henshall 2012; King 2011). Thus, while the blues is fundamentally a
black American aesthetic form (Jones 1963), with early history in Memphis, Chicago, St.
Louis, and even Los Angeles (Guralnick 2006; Jones 1963; Wald 2004, 2004), it would
make sense, and perhaps be expected, that it would resonate the “loudest” for
expansive catalog of social science research documenting how the arrival and expansion of
tourism scenes in a place often engenders feelings of resentment and disapproval among
residents (Andereck et al. 2005; Besculides, Lee, and McCormick 2002; Frenkel et al. 2000;
King 2011; Thomas 2014; for a review see Harrill 2004). And, indeed, those sentiments
colored many of the conversations that I had with black Clarksdalians. They peppered me
with comments like, “(Clarksdale) is all about just the blues, blues, blues, blues, blues”; “All
11
they do is the blues, which, if you look at it, ain’t nothing but some juke joints and Moonies”;
and occasionally, “If I hear about one more blues festival, my eyes go’n cross.”
Yet, the Delta’s blues—which I discuss briefly in a later section and at length in
chapter one—is only part of the story. Time and again, residents, whether young or old,
native or not, attributed social meaning to the blues that was rooted in memories and
histories that long preceded the Delta’s most recent blues revival and far outflanked the
geographic bounds of the Mississippi Blues Trail. For instance, in addition to dismissing the
significance and appeal of local blues venues like Moonies, residents dispensed with a
whole catalog of blues memories—experiences that ranged from being among the first
students to integrate the city school district in the 1970’s, to one man’s poverty and
homelessness in 1997, to ongoing concerns about healthcare and future wellbeing. Further,
residents associated Clarksdale’s blues performance scenes not only with streams of
tourists but also, and perhaps more aptly, with the town’s and region’s history of racial
exclusion and violence. Recall the matter-of-factness with which Doris noted that,
“Downtown was for the whites.” Similarly, her son Hamp, 31, explained what he and other
residents referred to as the “Dog Law”: “No niggas (were) to be seen (downtown or in the
all-white Oakhurst community) after 12-midnight.” Thus, while I Don’t Like the Blues takes
seriously the direct claims and appraisals that black Clarksdalians make regarding blues
music and the Delta’s blues revival—what we might think of as the “downbeat,” understood
12
The “downbeat-backbeat” heuristic is perhaps also a useful way to think about the
fundamental theoretical impulse of I Don’t Like the Blues. While conventional scholarly and
popular accounts of race and regional life in the U.S. typically focus on the affirmative, or
most emphasized, capacities of black expressivity and experience, the account offered here
is necessarily concerned with the “off” spaces, or, again, the backbeat. Here, I am arguing
that it is just as important and analytically useful to examine what black (southern)
Americans don’t like, where they aren’t going, and what they don’t envision in their futures
the work of Kevin Quashie, who cautions against reading black culture as always, only
pronounced and assertive, loud and public. Instead, he argues for a deeper recognition of
“Quiet…is a metaphor for the full range of one’s inner life—one’s desires,
ravishing—is a stay against the dominance of the social world; it has its own
sovereignty. It is hard to see, even harder to describe, but no less potent in its
Similarly, to listen for the reasons and ways that black southerners like Doris, her son
Hamp, and their neighbors, family, and friends in Clarksdale “don’t like the blues” is to
allow for their full(er) range of expressivity. It considers both their fears and their faith,
their anxieties and their triumphs, their memories and their aspirations.
13
Thus, the case for interrogating what it means to “not like the blues” is a case for the
enduring interpretive and analytic value of minding the “backbeats” of blackness. Scholars
have long noted the cultural shift among black Americans away from the blues and towards
other interpolations of music and cultural forms, whether soul and r&b (Neal 2002; Van
Deburg 1993) disco, funk, or hip-hop (Asante 2008; Chang 2005; Rose 1994). Yet, while
some scholars have noted these trends and contended that the blues now has only
marginal relevance for contemporary readings of black life (e.g., Daley 2003; George 1988;
Jones 2007; Wald 2004), I am arguing that we should be turning towards and leaning into
these patterns of disengagement, asking what they might signal about other aspects of
black life and epistemology. For instance, what does a decision to dispense with, “not like,”
or “leave behind” the blues say about the specific and general ways that black southerners
use memory to negotiate their anxieties, aspirations, and everyday concerns about life?
What do decisions to avoid blues performance scenes—that is, to “never (have) been to a
blues show”—say about the sophisticated, if routine, calculations black southerners make
when navigating actual and imagined geographies in the South? What do local views of the
effectiveness and viability of the blues as a mechanism for economic and community
development say about the folk futurism that black southerners often rely on when
Even as the blues holds only nominal commercial appeal among black (southern)
Americans, as I demonstrate here, they continue to reflect on and reckon with it—with
what it means for who they are and how they see themselves; with how it manifests in their
lived environments and various spatial geographies; indeed, with how they read the past
onto the present and future. Here again, Quashie (2012) is instructive:
14
“In humanity, quiet is inevitable, essential. It is a simple, beautiful part of
An aesthetic of quiet is not incompatible with black culture, but to notice and
understand it requires a shift in how we read, what we look for, and what we
[1951]) instructs, that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past” (p. 73). Thus, while an
cultural studies, black theology, and musicology have celebrated the theoretical and
epistemological necessity of viewing black life through the prism of more (post)modern
expressivities like soul and hip-hop most prominently (Asante 2008; Ashe 2007; Ashe et al.
2007; David 2007; George 2005; Hopkinson and Moore 2006; Jones 2007; Kitwana 2003;
Neal 2002; Schur 2007; Van Deburg 1993), I Don’t Like the Blues lingers on and listens for
the blues epistemology because, advisedly, the blues still lingers in black southern life, even
if, as I’ll demonstrate here, black southerners are not listening to it.
CALL TO HOME? REFOCUSING THE RURAL SOUTH IN THE STUDY OF BLACK LIVES AND
RACIAL EPISTEMOLOGIES
15
While I Don’t Like the Blues lends, generally, to commentary on black racial
attitudes, black placemaking logics, and black folk epistemologies, I also take seriously the
mediates, and sometimes reconfigures (conversations about) race and vice versa (Cobb
2005; Griffin 2004, 2006; Reed 1982; Robinson 2014). Thus, it is important to note that
this is explicitly an exploration of the black South and black southerners—not merely black
Americans living in the South, and not merely the blues as it is “played” in southern
concerned with how the American South, in its economic systems, social relations, and
cultural mores, has adapted during periods of conflict and change,(Griffin 2001; Reed
2013) and a theoretical paradigm that interrogates the relationship between the South and
nation (Griffin 2000). This mode of inquiry has generated much traction around questions
of “race relations,” entering the social sciences as scholars took interest in the experiences
“For many reasons, it would appear that the time is ripe for undertaking a thorough
study…of the real condition of the Negro” (p. 1), writes W.E.B. Du Bois (1898) in one of the
earliest entries in this tradition, a study the Black Belt town of Farmville, Virginia. Du Bois,
along with a group of his students from the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory (Wright II
2016), went on to complete four additional monographs on black southern life at the turn
of the century, including profiles of rural towns in Georgia (Du Bois 1901) and Alabama
(Du Bois 1899b); a reflection on his time teaching at an elementary school in rural
16
Tennessee (Du Bois 1899a); and an assessment of the condition of black farmers in the
Following Du Bois, the work of scholars such as Allison Davis, Burleigh Gardner, and
Mary Gardner in Deep South; John Dollard in Caste and Class in a Southern Town; Charles
Johnson in Shadow of the Plantation and Growing up in the Black Belt; Hortense
importantly here, located its purview in the region’s rural countryside. Each of these
studies was set in the rural Black Belt, and all but Raper’s included at least one site in the
Mississippi Delta. To be sure, centering the rural South in this way was largely a function of
practical necessity. During the first few decades of the twentieth century, most black
southerners lived in the South on or in close proximity to the plantations where they had
been enslaved, and, thus, to study race relations in general or black southerners in
particular necessarily required visiting the rural South. However, as others have noted
(e.g., Woods 1998; Robinson 2014), this geographic mandate was more than a matter of
empirics. It was also rooted in the notion, which I am implicitly endorsing here, that the
rural South was/is the cradle and proving ground for black American life writ large (Woods
1998).
Despite its early import and widespread contributions, by the 1940’s empirical
interest in the southern question, at least as a widely recognized domain of inquiry, had
begun to wane (Griffin 2001). Black southerners had completed the largest internal
Wilkerson 2011), Kansas (Painter 1992), and Louisville (Adams 2006)—and, for all intents
17
and purposes, the geographic locus of social science research had followed them 5. More
recently, as millions of black Americans “return” from their migration destinations and
(re)settle in in the South (Adelman and Tolnay 2000; Frey 2004; Hunt, Hunt, and Falk
have, too, returned to the southern question, excited to take inventory of a region, again,
becoming “new” (Frey 2004; Kreyling 2005; Lloyd 2012; Reed 2013). In this, the most
recent, instantiation of the “New South,” sprawling suburban neighborhoods spill from
rapidly growing “New Urban South” cities, from Dallas to Atlanta to Washington D.C. (Lacy
2007; Lloyd 2012); “New Destination” communities spring up in rural Texas and North
Carolina, offering work and the promise of economic stability to a new class of Latinx
immigrants (Ribas 2015); and Historic Urban South cities swell, full with both native black
southerners who have always called the region home and their once “migrating cousins”
now returning (Adelman and Tolnay 2000, 2000; Frey 2004; Hunt et al. 2004; Robinson
Table 1. Selected Demographic Characteristics for the eleven “Central” Counties of the
Mississippi Delta, 1970-2013
5 This diminished interest in studying the South, what Robinson (2014) aptly refers to as “looking way” from
the South, (p. 5) has continued largely unabated to present, save a few notable exceptions. Carol Stack
maintained an analytic and geographic interest in the rural South in her two most noted studies, All our Kin
(1974) and Call to Home (1996), both focused on how black southerners are making and remaking notions of
“home,” “memory,” and “belonging” as they return to the South. Falk (2004) extends Stack’s work to the
2000’s, focusing on a black family living in a rural Georgia community. Finally, and perhaps of more interest
to regional and cultural studies scholars, a small cadre of (southern) historians and folklorists have
maintained a somewhat vibrant tradition of chronicling and illuminating the region’s history and culture
(Ferris 1970, 1978, 1983, Griffin 2000, 2001; Griffin and Doyle 1995; Reed 1982, 1986b, 1986a, 2013).
18
Yet, as Doris King alludes to in the opening exchange, promise and growth is not the
whole of the newest New South story. Alongside the bustling Urban South and the busy
New Destination South, is the South of Clarksdale and the Mississippi Delta—as Doris
notes, the “country South”—where demographic growth is mired in the shadows of vacant
houses and empty city blocks, economic expansion lumbers in collapsing cotton gins and
boarded storefronts, and Old South race relations cast a shadow as long as the day. Indeed,
the standard indicators of New South change are turned on their head in the Delta, in fact,
Between 1970 and 2013, for instance, the population of the eleven “central” 6 counties of
the Mississippi Delta declined by about 30 percent; the unemployment rate increased
fivefold; and, after modest improvement in the years following World War II (Gibbs 2003),
poverty rates stagnated at nearly triple the national average (see Table 1). In the same time
period, the proportion of black residents in the region grew from 60 to 70 percent—further
cementing the Delta’s status as the largest block of predominantly black counties in the
6 For nearly a century, an expansive collection of research reports, monographs, books, federal commissions,
and policy platforms have set out to study and address the social problems of the Mississippi Delta. Yet, to
date, there have been few systematic efforts to define the region’s geographic boundaries. Is it enough to note
Cohn’s (1948) oft-repeated claim that, “The Mississippi Delta begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in
Memphis and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg” (p. 12)? How do we derive the spatial parameters of the
Delta from the language included in the Lower Mississippi Delta Development Act of 1988, which defines the
region as, “those areas within a reasonable proximity of the Mississippi River…that suffer from any
combination of high unemployment; low net family income, agriculture and oil industry decline; a decrease in
small business activity; or poor or inadequate transportation infrastructure, health care, housing, or
educational opportunities” (section 4.2)? Some studies focus on the amoebic mass of land flanked to the
South and North by Issaquena and Tunica Counties, respectively, and to the West and East by the Mississippi
and Yazoo Rivers (e.g., Cobb 1994). Other studies are more inclusive, extending the region’s boundaries more
inland (from the Mississippi River), including in their 18-plus-county Mississippi Delta such central counties
as Panola, Grenada, and Tate (e.g., Willis 2000). Following designations put forth by Reinschmiedt and Green
(1989), the most straightforward and robust classification system that I have come across, I draw distinctions
between “central” and “fringe” Delta counties. The central Mississippi Delta includes those eleven Mississippi
counties “lying entirely within the flatland Delta region” of the state: Bolivar, Coahoma, Humphreys,
Issaquena, Leflore, Quitman, Sharkey, Sunflower, Tallahatchie, Tunica, and Washington. Unless indicated, all
data, including my own calculations in Table 1, reference social and demographic trends in these eleven
central counties.
19
U.S.—a function of both unprecedented rates of white population loss and menial rates of
While the magnitude and scope of demographic and economic restructuring in the
Delta are exceptional—giving way to some of the most pronounced levels of inequality and
structural decline in the nation (Austin et al. 2009; Delta Regional Authority 2015)—they
are not distinct, as the Delta’s structural profile is emblematic of many places throughout
the U.S. Black Belt8. Similar to the Delta, one in five residents, and a third of all black
residents, of the Black Belt live below the poverty line, and the region lags behind national
educational attainment, job growth, and labor force participation (Gibbs 2003). Further,
while some places in the region have experienced high rates of Latinx immigration
(Lippard and Gallagher 2010), the Black Belt, like the Delta, maintains a majority black-
Still, recent studies of the New South have focused primarily on questions of
growing racial diversity, and centered primarily on the region’s large metropolitan areas
and urban centers; and as I discussed in brief earlier, the most robust scholarly
commentary on the rural South is largely confined to the forty or so years between the turn
of the century and Word War II. What is lost as a result, in addition to a representative and
7 There was a brief period between 1948 and 1951 in which the Mississippi Unemployment Compensation
Commission brought some one thousand Mexican farm workers to the Mississippi Delta to help chop and
harvest cotton (Woods 1998). While Tallahatchie County currently has the highest proportion of Hispanic
residents, this number is comprised mostly of the Latinx men in the Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility
(Logue 2006). In total, less than 3 percent of the Delta’s population is comprised of Latinx residents.
8 Here, Black Belt refers to the 200-plus counties from West Texas to Virginia with high concentrations of
black residents and historic ties to the South’s Plantation economy (see Gibbs 2003).
20
opportunity to revisit current sociological paradigms on black racial epistemologies,
placemaking logics, and, more generally, race relations in the U.S. In particular, as scholars
turn more and more to southern cities to explore the nation’s burgeoning “diversity
explosion” (Frey 2014), to document and explain the “browning of America” (Phillips
2016), to forecast the coming “majority minority” national portrait (Craig and Richeson
2014), and to theorize the potential of a “tri-racial” (Bonilla-Silva and Glover 2004)—nay
post-racial or post-black (Touré 2012)—U.S. society, I Don’t Like the Blues explores a place
“In the Mississippi Delta, first you have cotton,” Clarksdale mayor Carl White
comments, his hands folded tightly behind his head, his feet propped on the edge of his
crowded desk. In 2011, Carl ran an unsuccessful bid for state governor. Two years later he
turned his efforts to Clarksdale, becoming the town’s first white mayor in twenty years.
Like other elected officials, he notes the enduring economic benefits of the blues in
Clarksdale. “Soybeans, rice, and, here recently, corn has been big, but probably one of our
biggest crops—it harvests year-round—our biggest export is the blues.” Indeed, in many
ways, the blues is the Delta’s biggest export, the region’s prevailing cultural zeitgeist, its
lingua franca. First, as I have outlined in the previous section and will explore at length in
chapter one, the Delta has the “structural blues.” Residents of the region, black residents in
particular, face many obstacles in their daily lives, whether inadequate or unavailable
public services, from healthcare, to clean water, to housing; a regional economy offering
21
little more than low-wage and menial work; or an opportunity structure defined by social
Yet, the Delta does not just have the blues; it plays the blues too. In Merigold, Po’
Monkey’s stands as one of the last-remaining “original” juke joints; in Cleveland, Dockery
Farms commemorates its own Charley Patton, Son House, Howlin’ Wolf, and a veritable
who’s who of blues musicians; and in Clarksdale, a dedicated group of blues enthusiasts,
both natives and itinerant tourists, make their weekly rounds—watching through the
cluttered windows of the Bluesberry café on Mondays, dancing between the Hambone
Gallery and “Rock & Blues” Museum on Tuesday nights, singing in front of the shadowy
stage at New Roxy on Wednesday, glowing beneath the string lights of Moonies and Ground
Zero on Thursday, and drifting between a pulsing cluster of juke joints the weekend
through.
“We’ve got all the blues you wan’a hear, whenever you wan’a hear it, however you
wan’a hear it,” Mayor White brags with a deep southern drawl. His optimism trickles down.
For white blues enthusiasts who live in and frequent Clarksdale and the Delta, the blues
evokes excitement and fascination, a glimpse of “the real South” and “real blues players.”
For white native and long-term residents of the Delta, the blues is about regional heritage,
“something good to show off about this place the Delta.” However, for black Delta
communities, accounted for here in the perspectives of black Clarksdalians, the blues has
In the same way that Doris King had gone on to laugh coyly while listing “Luther,”
“Marvin,” and “the guy who sings Mom’s Apple Pie” as her favorite singers, black
Clarksdalians were at least a generation removed from crooning to Muddy Waters and B.B.
22
King. Indeed, they did not like blues music—not Bessie Smith, not Chicago blues, not the
Memphis sound. Their music preferences had long been reset, to the lighter sounds of Betty
Wright and Bobby Rush, the call-and-response of the Brown Sisters and Lee Williams, the
yodeling lilts of Sam Cooke and Patti Labelle, and, for younger residents, the “countrified”
bass of Big K.R.I.T. Yet, as I have mentioned, residents’ attitudes about the blues were about
more than guitars and harmonicas, Hell Hounds and Hoochie Coochie Men. Time and again,
experience gone by. They also spoke about the blues in racial terms, as both a practice and
a place that was more appealing to and welcoming for white residents and tourists. Finally,
they associated the blues and blues tourism with the future structural and development
First, the blues summoned residents to a mnemonic space that allowed them to
revisit and reckon with experiences from their past. As such, a request to “define the blues”
or reflect on “what the blues means,” effectively became a request to remember some
experience from the past. In most cases, these memories were personal, or
“autobiographical” (Olick and Robbins 1998); always vivid and textured; and centered on
experiences of hardship or, as we will hear from native resident Rick Sutton in chapter two,
“struggle times.” And, even as residents acknowledged, enumerated, and celebrated the
“lessons” that these blues memories had brought, they maintained that the blues, itself, was
23
When black residents frame the blues in this way—as a stand-in for past personal
contextual factors that shape how social groups come to view historical events both
independently and in relation to their social lives 9. In general, this literature has explored
how the past becomes enshrined and represented in public culture, as with statues and
heritage sites (Alonso 1988; Foucault 1980; Leydesdorff, Passerini, and Thompson 1996;
Lipsitz 1990; Thelen 1989; Wilson 1996) and how conflicted, violent, or otherwise difficult
pasts are remembered and commemorated, as with museums memorializing the tragedies
and travesties of mass violence and human genocide (Jacobs 2010; Levy and Sznaider
Though decidedly “newer” and, thus, less developed and expansive than studies of
(Vinitzky-Seroussi and Teeger 2010; Whitlinger 2015), “denial” (Maier 1993; Zerubavel
2006) and “forgetting” (Fowler 2005; Gross 2000). These studies give attention to the
processes of contestation that play out in public spaces over how some memories—taken
a historical figure, social group, or event come to be suppressed, obscured, or otherwise not
9 While some scholars recognize Hugo von Hofmannsthals’s, “the damned up force of our mysterious
ancestors” as one of the earliest references to the social capacities of memory processes (see Olick and
Robbins 1998 or Schieder 1978), most contemporary studies begin with Maurice Halbwachs' On Collective
Memory and Marc Bloch's “Mémoire collective, tradition, et coutume: À propos d'un livre recent,” both
published in 1925. Other key texts include Bartlett (1932), Evans-Pritchard (1940), Cooley (1918), and
(Mead 1932). We might also include Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Marx’s Eighteenth
Brumaire, Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk in
the early canon of social memory studies.
24
remembered. These studies also ask how and why groups with shared experiences or
opt to shirk their own collective memories. Thus far, findings have identified two general
processes. First, dominant groups might engage in concerted and directed campaigns to
discredit or erase a particular history. Whitlinger (2015) writes, “those groups occupying
dominant social positions are able to advance a particular official version of the past by
controlling access to information, the means of dissemination, and the very terms of
discussion” (p. 650). Second, mnemonic communities might purposively engage in acts of
“overt” and “covert silence” (Vinitzky-Seroussi and Teeger 2010) to “diminish the potency”
(p. 1115) of the emotional, or in some cases physical, distress of an experience or set of
events.
I Don’t Like the Blues joins this as yet growing domain of study, on one hand,
reiterating previous calls to cast a wider net in studies of social memory and, on the other,
calling for a more intentioned study of the social and epistemological motives and goals of
the actors, or mnemonic communities, involved. What Doris King and other residents of
Clarksdale are doing when they dispense wit, or claim to “not like,” the blues does not
really connote “forgetting” and is not fully captured by concepts such as “denial” or
“silencing.” To the contrary, they are fully present in (and with) their memories, and even if
between extended silent pauses and deep reflection, they ably revisit these memories. They
recount vivid scenes of hardship and struggle, being sad and afraid, appreciating simple
living and laughing in gardens. Yet, to be sure, there was almost always a point in which
residents explained that the blues no longer captured their individual and collective
realities. In my view, these proclamations represent a desire, not to forget, but to “move
25
beyond,” not to deny or silence, but to “leave behind.” These epistemological moves are not
resilience, and determination. Indeed, here, silence is loud, aimed at reclaiming and holding
to, in the context of Woods’ (1998) blues epistemology, an individual and collective sense
Second, for the vast majority of black Clarksdalians that I spoke with, the blues had
come to hold pronounced racial meaning. Doris King had never been to a blues show, at
least not to hear the blues, and in the one instance that she did remember going, she
bemoaned the space’s tacky interior—crooked floors and leaning tablecloths. Like her,
black residents of Clarksdale were virtually completely absent from the crowds at the local
circuit of day festivals, and they rarely patronized the nightly scene of juke joints and blues
clubs. Residents insisted that this absence, too, was active and intentional. They described
the music often heard at establishments like Moonies and T-Bone’s as “white folks’ music,”
and they framed the venues themselves as “where the white folks go.” In this way, Doris’s
claim of absence and her dereliction of the aesthetics of Moonies can be taken as a
statement not only about the entertainment value of the blues, but about the spatial and
When residents interpret Clarksdale’s blues scenes in this way—as “white music”
and “white places”—they are straddling three related traditions of social science
commentary. First, they are engaging in the process “racialization” (Banton 1967; Barot
26
and Bird 2001; Omi and Winant 2015), the social-cognitive act of attributing racial
meaning to human bodies, social practices, cultural objects, and, of somewhat recent
import, the built environment (Gieryn 2000; Lipsitz 2007). While scholars have long noted
the ways in which individuals read race onto various domains of public culture, and while
blues musicologists and enthusiasts have long claimed that black Americans now view the
blues as a white expressive form (Daley 2003; George 1988; Jones 2007; Wald 2004), I
Don’t Like the Blues offers, to my knowledge, the first empirical account of what black
(southern) Americans are actually saying about the blues to this end.
Second, what is striking about the line of reasoning that leads residents away from
Moonies, the Juke Joint Festival, and Clarksdale’s other blues scenes is that it is predicated
as much on the town’s and region’s racial history as it is on the racial composition of the
nightly social scenes. That is to say, Doris’s “never even been to a blues show” is motivated
as much by sad music, crooked floors, and leaning tables as it is about downtown “(being)
for the whites.” The role that place history(ies) play in contemporary and emergent
processes of racialization, while not unchartered empirical territory (Omi and Winant
2015), does remain an understudied topic both in critical race studies and in more varied
studies exploring how place shapes, reinforces, and sometimes challenges existing power
Finally, while scholars have long taken interest in how black communities “make”
(Hunter 2013) new places when social processes such as “urban renewal” and structural
blight hamper, demolish, or gentrify their old ones (Hunter et al. 2016; Liebow 1967),
decidedly less attention has been given to the everyday logics and practices that black
27
places. Ultimately, I am positing here that when black residents racialize and avoid
Clarksdale’s blues performance scenes, they are drawing on a critical “spatial imaginary”
(Lipsitz 2007) that recognizes how, as Robinson (2014) notes, “the past—in varying
forms—both is and interrupts the Contemporary South” (p. 4). In this case, the past is a
spatial one and the “Contemporary South” emerges in the riffs, muddled laughter, and
predominantly white audiences of the Blues Alley District. Here, I Don’t Like the Blues
echoes and substantiates the claim, implied by Woods (1998) and explicitly stated by
Lipsitz (2007) and Ruffin (2009), that the blues epistemology is both an ethno-racial and
Re-writing the Regional Future—or, “The Blues Just Won’t Keep us Standing.”
Finally, black Clarksdalians imagined the blues as an arena to explore their ideas
and aspirations about the future. When Doris reasoned “the blues just won’t keep us
standing,” she was challenging the wisdom of the town’s decision to center the blues in its
economic development campaign. She was very clearly, and with an air of foreboding
reproach, theorizing about the prudence of the town’s growing commitment to blues
tourism and the future trajectory of black neighborhoods in Clarksdale. Other black
residents echoed her claim, critiquing the blues revival as a misguided development agenda
that was operated by a select group of white public officials and stakeholders, and that
agenda that was rooted in and informed by local black communities, organized by leaders
28
who “had their hearts in the right place,” and infused with a more democratic and
egalitarian set of unifying goals. Here too, they echoed Doris, at once expressing a sense of
pessimism about the long-term social and economic viability of blues tourism, as with, “the
blues (simply) won’t keep us standing”; and imagining an alternate, possibly more
promising, regional future that required either something different from or in addition to
By framing the blues in this way—as both a harbinger of the past and a space to
theorize the future—black residents are updating a tradition of critical commentary that
domination and racial inequality in the Mississippi Delta. Whether in early monographs
such as Donald Grubbs' Cry from the Cotton, Jay Mandle’s The Roots of Black Poverty, and
One Kind of Freedom by Ransom and Sutch, or more recent work such as James Cobb’s The
Most Southern Place on Earth, a robust group of scholars have argued that the Delta’s post-
phenomenon nor a function of social or spatial isolation. To the contrary, they posit that the
region has suffered from a series of overly paternalistic, often violent and destructive,
approaches to regional planning and economic development. Cobb (1994) says as much:
“...[M]any of the human and material extremes that were the keys to the
shaped not by its isolation but by pervasive global and national economic
29
policies often confirmed the Delta’s inequities and reinforced its
Woods (1998) echoes Cobb and others, arguing that the story of the Mississippi
beginning with the sharecropping and tenant farming systems that emerged after
Emancipation and Reconstruction and rearticulated variably in Roosevelt’s New Deal, the
work of the Delta Council, and eventually Clinton’s Lower Mississippi Delta Development
Commission. The accounts offered suggest that black Clarksdalians are positioning the
region’s blues revival as the most recent development agenda in this procession, giving
new credence to Woods’ claim that black Delta communities have always bore the full
weight of the Delta’s violent and exploitive plantation system while also serving as its
characterize the blues—as environment of memory, racialized social space, and arena of
regional futurism—I Don’t Like the Blues joins an interpretive tradition that treats “blues,”
not just as a configuration of guttural lyrics, lowered fifth notes, and a pulsing downbeat
but as a site of meaning and experience, a way of reckoning and reconstruction. As such,
the blues becomes entre to broader commentary about black southern life and sensibility.
identity, truth, and change, and craft a new vision for a non-oppressive approach to
30
Project Overview
I Don’t Like the Blues begins on the Tuesday after the town’s noted Juke Joint
Festival, with me joining Nathaniel “Biggs” Brownlee, a 27-year-old native resident, for a
busking session on the downtown square. His commentary, and the accompanying scene
set the backdrop for I Don’t Like the Blues, a structurally dynamic Mississippi Delta with a
blues revival keeping the beat. Drawing on nearly fifty years of Census data, interview and
oral history accounts from local residents, and reconstructed scenes from a riding tour with
native resident Junior Freeman, I trace the Delta’s recent structural narrative, what some
have called a development crisis. I then blend archival and contemporary accounts of
Clarksdale, Coahoma County, and the Delta to chronicle the move by local elected officials
to incorporate blues tourism into the region’s (and state’s) economic development plan.
Earlier, Town Mayor Carl White heralded the blues as the region’s chief export. “Look at the
Chapter two, “I (Still) Don’t Like the Blues,” takes an initial look at black
Clarksdalians’ varied characterizations and appraisals of the blues, beginning with 45-year-
old native resident Rick Sutton recounting a time when he was homeless and living in an
“old raggedy school bus.” I use this chapter to explore what a commitment to exploring the
backbeat of black social memory might look like. In particular, I demonstrate the ways in
which black residents frame the blues as an environment of memory, and then embody this
stand-in for the past, and given the nature of this past, residents insist that it—at once, the
31
blues and their blues memory(ies)—is something that they have moved beyond; something
that, if given the option, they would not want to go back to. I argue that when residents
make this mnemonic move, straddling and blurring boundaries between remembering and
forgetting, commemorating and letting go, they are engaging in an active and intentional
pursuit of humanistic autonomy—that is, the capacity to fashion a present disposition and
Chapter three, “Never Been to a Blues Show,” turns from the mnemonic to the
spatial, exploring the explicit and subversive ways in which black residents frame the
blues, or more aptly Clarksdale’s blues performance circuit, as a site of racial meaning and
experience. I chronicle the sophisticated, if routine, logics that residents employ when
deciding whether and how they will participate in local blues performance scenes and
other adjacent businesses. Here, I begin with a scene from the first night of the Hambone
Blues Festival, describing the pulsing scene of guitars and percussion, beer and muddled
laughter, but no black folks. Theoretically, this chapter unpacks how residents’ spatial
imaginaries play on both past (racial) place histories and the potential of future racial, nay
Chapter four, “The Blues Just Won’t Keep Us Standing,” explores how black residents
use the blues as an avenue to ponder and theorize the future. In particular, I document
what residents have to say about the impact and long-term viability of the blues revival. I
note their opinions on the openings (and closings) of blues venues, the constant
and the apparent lack of structural benefits that these efforts have portended for local
black communities. Here, I am arguing that black Clarksdalians are engaging in a type of
32
“plantation critique” (1998), whereby they name and levy critiques against the people and
institutions that they deem to be responsible for the town’s, especially the black
communities therein, structural obstacles. These efforts are intent on creating the space,
both imagined and actual, for a future in which the blues–whether blues music, the town’s
blues development plan, or the region’s structural blues—can be joined, or better, replaced,
In the conclusion, I revisit the major themes from each chapter and consider the
importance of this account for broader commentary in the social sciences. In particular, I
consider what “listening for the blues (epistemology)” might mean for future studies of
blackness, black southernness, and southern blackness. The chapter ends as it should, in
the quiet of Doris King’s office, me listening intently as she recounted, with all deliberate
33
Chapter 1: “Look at the Downtown.”: The Making(s) of a Blues Place
A white tourist couple emerges slowly from the pale-pink doors of Mag Pie’s Gift and
Art Boutique on Clarksdale’s downtown square. They move slowly, surveying the stillness
of Yazoo Avenue, stopping a few paces beyond the cluttered shop windows to gather
themselves. The woman deposits a small bag into her tote. The man returns something to
his back pocket and opens a pair of sunglasses to his face. Their attention shifts to a wide
blue sign jutting from the sidewalk in front of a shadowy building—a Mississippi Blues
Trail Marker for the WROX radio station. It is the Tuesday after Clarksdale’s annual Juke
Joint Weekend, one of the largest blues festivals in the country. Most of the festivalgoers
have left town, but the couple’s stay has extended into the week.
Across the street, Biggs takes a deep pull from his cigarette and sets loose an
echoing guitar lick that lands somewhere between “Way Down in the Hole” and Sunday
morning devotion. At 27, Biggs is one of the youngest musicians on Clarksdale’s blues
circuit, and his local roots have made him a juke joint favorite. He has spent the previous
few days playing an impossible schedule of stage and sidewalk shows on the square.
Although he fancies himself the “hardest working man in Clarksdale,” he jokes that today is
a rest day—two hours of busking in front of Cat Head, a music and folk art store—a break
from his rugged performance style of off-key hollers, stacked chord progressions, and
34
The couple looks across at Biggs and I, momentarily satisfied with watching and
listening from a distance. Then, they step down from the sidewalk and cross the street in
our direction. “Sounding good!” The man raises a thumbs-up towards Biggs as they move
closer. Biggs plays on. “See, honey, he’s a real blues player,” the man comments to his wife,
and as he continues to badger Biggs with dry jokes and empty clichés—“Man, if I could play
that thing like you, I’d be alright!”—the woman retrieves a few crumpled bills from her tote
and drops them in a coffee tin at the edge of the sidewalk. She then falls into an offbeat two-
step, her hands meeting silently on the one and three, her feet shuffling clumsily on the two
and four. The exchange unfolds for several minutes, until, seemingly prompted by newly
budding sunshine, the couple thanks Biggs and disappears around a building corner.
“Man, if I could leave this motherfucker [Clarksdale] today, I would,” Biggs is talking
through is his plans for the future, pausing here to note his mounting frustrations about
Clarksdale’s opportunity structure. “Unless, I could find just a real, good-paying job, or get
my own business.” He turns to his amplifier, a shiny, silver, and impossibly heavy box
positioned close beside him, pausing momentarily to fiddle with a set of nobs on top. “I
want a family, I want a kid, but not here…Can’t do shit for ‘em here.”
“Bruh, I’m out,” he says, dragging each syllable. “Whenever I get a chance.”
“Atlanta, New York, anywhere. You go to a place like Atlanta, you know they
hiring…They’ll hire you to do anything. Down here, it’s not jobs like that…The last, like,
three years been rough for me. No funds. No crib. Working this job.” Biggs bemoans having
to commute to a nearby town to work a temporary construction job. “(It’s) the hardest
35
work I ever done—mane I hate that shit, really—but it helps.” Biggs holds his guitar closer
and prepares to play again. “Put it like this, you born here, you live here, you been through
In the last fifty years, two structural transformations have reshaped community life
in Clarksdale, and Biggs sits at the crossroads. First, the Delta region is in throes of a
widespread, extreme poverty; ongoing population loss; failing public infrastructure; and
inadequate civic services. Beyond specialty shops like Mag Pie’s, a scatter of Blues Trail
markers, and a handful of blues clubs and restaurants, Clarksdale’s downtown square is
flush with empty and boarded storefronts; and on most days, the pedestrian traffic is as
sparse as the Tuesday after Juke Joint. A mile west of the square, the sprawling “Oakhurst”
bout of “white flight.” Since 1990, while the population of Oakhurst has remained at about
6,100 residents, the proportion of its white residents has dropped by a precipitous 70
percent (see Table 4). Just across the tracks of the Illinois Central Railroad south of the
square, with more than 60 percent of its residents living below the poverty line, the “Black
and, in fact, is among the poorest cluster of neighborhood blocks in the Delta (see Table 5).
Biggs and the opening scene with the tourist couple, Mag Pie’s, Cat Head’s, and the
Blues Trail Marker also illuminate the everyday machinations of a second bout of local
restructuring—the Delta’ ongoing blues revival. To be sure, the region has long occupied
popular consciousness as the “Land of the Blues,” and most scholarly accounts point to
Delta towns, from Clarksdale to Tutwiler, and Delta-born bluesmen, from Robert Johnson
36
to W.C. Handy, as the genre’s progenitors (Jones 1963; Palmer 1982; Wald 2004). However,
that towns in the region now feature blues sites and scenes so prominently is a relatively
recent occurrence, emerging first in the late 1970’s and expanding most rapidly in the late
1990’s and early 2000’s. In Clarksdale, there is the recently-renamed “Blues Alley,” a five-
block stretch on the downtown square flanked by a cluster of blues clubs, restaurants, and
juke joints; the Delta Blues Museum, host to exhibits and enrichment programs centered on
the region’s blues history; dozens of heritage markers and commemoration sites like the
Blues Trail; and all manner of blues festivals each year. When people visit the region—and
each year the tourist count far exceeds 20,000—they come to hear the blues, to play the
blues, or to “see what the blues is about.” This latter designation, I learned, was often a
more general reference to exploring the lore of the “real South,” or wandering about in the
region “with the ugliest history” off the beat and path.
development crisis and blues revival—has emerged in Clarksdale. While I give attention to
their early foundations, both beginning in the 1970’s, I focus particular attention on their
range of demographic data and reconstructing scenes from a riding tour of Clarksdale and
rural Coahoma County with native resident Junior Freeman. I then chronicle the key actors
and decisions that gave way to the blues revival, beginning in the rotunda of the Mississippi
State Capital with former Governor Haley Barbour and ending in the downtown law offices
of Clarksdale mayor Carl White. While my primary goal here is broad and descriptive—to
set the scene and backdrop for the stories and argument that follow—I am also attentive to
the potentially deficit-oriented tone that these sorts of accounts often take. With this in
37
mind, I have found it useful to consider residents’ prescriptions for the area along with
The years after 1970 marked a time of significant transition for small- and medium-
sized rural towns in the South, especially the eleven-county Mississippi Delta region. Still
suffering the ripple effects of the Great Flood of 1927, the Great Depression, the Great
Migration, and the New Deal10, black Delta communities were caught between two
emergent agricultural crises. One was largely confined to the Delta region between 1960
and 1970 (Woods 1998), and the other devastated rural economies throughout the nation
between 1976 and 1986 (Barnett 2000; Woods 1998). During this time, small farmers saw
related jobs became obsolete, and thousands of farm workers and their families were
compounded by the racial anxieties, and in many cases animus and hysteria, following
omnibus Civil Rights Legislation in the 1960’s. Federal calls for school integration were met
with the establishment of a separate, de facto all-white, education system (Munford 1973;
Walder and Cleveland 1971), and rather than face the prospects of neighborhood
integration, white southerners began fleeing small, southern towns en masse (Woods
10
Especially effective accounts of the social, political, economic, and geographic antecedents to the
Mississippi Delta’s post-1970’s structural profile can be found in James Cobb’s The Most Southern Place on
Earth, Clyde Woods’ Development Arrested, and Richard Mizelle Jr.'s Backwater Blues.
38
1998). The result was a development crisis—a region of economically fragile,
social relations.
In the 1980’s and 1990’s, regional and federal authorities took note of the Delta’s
nearly unprecedented structural decline. In 1988, Congress passed the Lower Mississippi
Delta Development Act, establishing the Lower Mississippi Delta Development Commission
Delta region. During this period, a cavalcade of regional and federal officials, including
then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, “toured” the region to take note of the alarming rates
As intimated in Biggs’s concluding comments from the opening scene, the Delta’s
development crisis has left (and continues to create anew) an indelible mark on
community life in Clarksdale. Native resident Junior Freeman also explained this to me
during a day-long riding tour through Clarksdale and Coahoma County. Junior had
explained the gesture, on one hand, as his way of welcoming me to the Delta and his
hometown and, on the other, as an opportunity to warn me of “the spots to be careful about
and to just keep out of.” We began in the “Oakhurst” neighborhood, taxiing along
inconspicuous backroads and dead-end streets, from the driveways and carports of his
friends and former classmates to a comfy couch at his parents’ home. He talked, I asked
“(Black) Downtown,” the “Brickyard,” “Oakhurst,” “Riverton,” the “Roundyard,” “Snob Hill,”
and the “Tennessee Williams District”—we both noted the sobering imprint left by the
region’s development crisis: neighborhood blocks, and in some cases, entire streets in
39
Oakhurst where more than a third of the homes were for sale; overgrown lots in Riverton
where chipped paneling and boarded windows were more common; a set of railroad tracks
that divided Black Downtown from the square; collapsing factories and cotton gins on the
town’s periphery.
“You want me to describe Clarksdale? It’s the Great Depression. The damn Great
Depression.” Junior slides his hand along the steering wheel of his sedan, his sarcastic
laughter interrupting the steady hum of the air conditioner. As we wait for the stoplight to
change, a rickety pickup truck passes through the intersection. The driver, an elderly, black
man, casually raises his arm from the edge of the truck’s lowered window and points in our
direction. Junior returns the gesture. “When I say Great Depression,” Junior continues, “this
what I mean by that. Clarksdale had ‘bout twenty thousand people or more when I was
coming up [in the 1980’s] and, back when I was here, ‘bout five (or) six factories. I’m
talking industries. Real jobs!” He hits the steering wheel with the side of his loosely
clinched fist. “Now? All that just dropped off the map.”
Indeed, Clarksdale’s population has declined from about 21,000 in 1970 and 1980 to
under 18,000 in 2013, a rate of about 18 percent. This figure, while lower than the average
for the Delta (29 percent), is on par with, and in many cases exceeds, those for other large
and medium-sized towns in the region. Consider Cleveland, Clarksdale’s nearest neighbor
in both size and proximity, which has undergone a 7-percent reduction in population in the
same period. More to Junior’s point, Clarksdale’s opportunity structure has also declined
40
precipitously in the last forty years. While Delta towns like Clarksdale experienced
significant growth in manufacturing jobs in the early 1970’s, a credit to state policies
growth was limited and short-lived (Woods 1998). By the 1980’s, many of the region’s
largest employers, from Delta to Boeing to General Motors, had closed, relocated, or
Today, the Delta’s labor market has become highly polarized, with the largest and
average less than $10 per hour and higher-paying professional occupations with
educational requirements that figure to preclude much of the region’s populous (Austin et
al. 2009; Delta Regional Authority 2015). Only about 22 percent of the Delta’s population
has earned a post-baccalaureate degree, and nearly thirty percent has less than a high
school diploma. These figures are consistent with other markers of economic wellbeing—
the Delta’s median household income is about $27,000, just above half (52%) of the
national average ($51,000) (U.S. Census Bureau), and about 75 percent of Mississippi’ s
average ($37,000). As a result, many local residents contend with under- and
national average—or, like Biggs, opt to commute to nearby towns for better-paying, if more
“That’s the shit that make it so rough out here,” Tremaine “Black” Johnson, a 28-
year-old native resident, coughs through a haze of smoke. “Niggas ain’t working, ain’t got
no jobs, and that’s the bad part. It’s really crazy, bruh. If niggas had some jobs, I think it’ll be
better.” Black was born in Clarksdale and now lives between his mom’s house in the
41
Brickyard, his friend’s couch in a neighboring town, and the backseat of his car. He explains
his transient living arrangements as a necessity, the cost of splitting time between jobs in
Memphis, Tennessee area and one of Clarksdale’s border towns. “It just depends on where
I’m at and if I had to work that night,” he explains. “I drive two hours one-way for my job, so
sometimes I don’t feel like just being out there on the road like that.”
opportunity would make it better. “Like honestly,” he lowers a glowing cigarillo into a
crumpled plastic cup and clears his throat. “Honestly, if it was more jobs out here
[Clarksdale], Clarksdale could be like a Tupelo [Mississippi] as far as industry and just
people doing better, and stuff like that. But, just for the simple fact that it’s no jobs here, it
Comments like Junior’s and Black’s are legion—a 27-year-old mother notes her
recurrent financial difficulties despite “working two full-time jobs” at local chain
restaurants. “I leave one job, I’m going right to the other…And, seem, like I get one check
and I’m looking right for the next one. It’s just not enough.” Elsewhere, a local pastor
describes his efforts to hire youth from the community as much as he can. “If I can hire two
young men from here, from our community, to wash my truck or to pick up them branches
from out there in front the (community center), then I know, for at least two hours, them
two young men ain’t out there being knuckleheads, and they getting a couple dollars in
their pocket…Otherwise, this place go’n keep taking ‘em from us.”
Inevitably, when I asked residents to talk about what Clarksdale “needs,” or what
would improve the town’s structural woes, they routinely cited a glaring need for a more
expansive and robust labor market. They were frustrated with the menial and service-
42
oriented jobs that were most prevalent in town. Addressing the Clarksdale’s employment
woes, they insisted, would necessarily address other aspects of the town’s structural
profile. More jobs would quash the town’s crime rates, which were among the highest in
the state and routinely doubled the national average. The possibility of work would
incentivize young people to stay and “put down roots…at home,” slowing the town’s steady
“When you give people work, you give people something to work for,” Junior notes.
“You give people something to live for…and you won’t see none of…this that’s been going
As the stoplight flashes green, Junior quickly flicks on his turn signal and makes a
right onto Madison Avenue. “Ride down here by the old high school,” he mumbles, and,
leaving little room for my input, he continues his monologue. “I left in ’93 (to enroll at the
University of Mississippi), and I just never came back,” he explains. “It just don’t make
sense (to come back). When you in a place where nothing is going on, nothing positive
anyway, it beats you down mentally.” He then shifts the focus to his parents. “My folks been
in this town forever. I’m try’n’a get ‘em out before it get just too too bad, but they don’t
wan’a leave. Then, their house is run-down. I should’ve showed you the tree that done fell
out there in the back(yard).” Junior raises his hand from the center console and extends his
open palm slightly in my direction. “So, I’m at a debate, you know: do I put money into the
house to fix it—redo the outside, fix the yard up, all that—or do I take that money to (help
43
them) move.” He sighs and lowers his hand. “But, then, that’s a hard debate too because you
kinda feel like you leaving your past behind. (Clarksdale) is home…” he lets the thought
linger, “sometimes you just… love it and hate it at the same damn time.””
Junior and I taxi along Madison Avenue slowly, eventually inching past an
intimidating building set off from the road, its gray and pale-red brickwork casting a hazy
glow, its broken windows offering dull reflections of the bright blue summer sky.
“That’s the old high school, there.” He points, nearly slowing to a stop.
“No, I went out to “The County” [Coahoma County High School]….This was the city
school…This was where the whites went up ‘til the 1960’s, 1970’s. They said it used to be a
pool out there…say that when the blacks started out there, they filled it up with concrete.
Now, I’m saying!” He raises his voice, but quickly stops himself, resigned to shake his head
much by the economic aftermath of the region’s agricultural depression as it was the racial
angst and animus associated with federal and local mandates to integrate the city school
district. Like most towns in the South, Brown’s call for desegregation did not reach the
Delta until the 1960’s, prompting, in short order, the rise of white-only private schools.
Between 1964 and 1974 some 15 such private academies were founded in the greater
Delta region, and more than 35 opened throughout the state of Mississippi. Now referred to
1971), these schools were established typically with the explicit intention of offering white
families a racially exclusive alternative to the region’s slowly integrating public school
44
system. In many cases, they were founded and opened in a matter of days, with little
planning and infrastructure. Schools opened in churches and vacant, or sparsely-used, civic
buildings and typically pilfered teachers, furniture, and supplies from the local public
movement when a group of white residents, in conjunction with the Mississippi Citizen’s
Council Association, founded Lee Academy, a K-12 school located on Lee Drive along
“I was in the seventh grade when integration came in,” recalls Ms. Mary Ellen McGee,
a 60-year-old native of Clarksdale. “They pulled us from Lyon and sent us to Higgins [Junior
High]—you had all the blacks, you know, who attended Higgins [Junior High School]—and
you saw some whites over there, but those [white students attending Higgins] was mostly
poverty-stricken children, you know.” Ms. Mary, who insisted that I “say the Misses”
whether I use her first, last, or full name, has an encyclopedic memory of what she calls
Clarksdale’s “integration years.” “Then, you had at that time (when) black students started
going to Clarksdale High. And, when that started to happen, the whites pulled out like that,”
she snaps her fingers, “and started going to Lee [Academy].” She laughs to herself before
continuing, repeating Junior’s earlier claim. “That swimming pool right by the old high
school, when black kids started going out there, they filled it up with concrete. That’s the
Junior also notes Oakhurst’s racial turnover. “All in this area, by the school, back
towards Cypress (Avenue), all that, this whole block was nothing but white,” Junior
45
“Where did they go? Where the white folks go?” I ask.
“Most of ‘em? Most of ‘em left!” He laughs. “They would go to Oxford, or to Olive
Branch, even down to Cleveland…You do still have some whites that’s here [in Clarksdale].
In a minute, I’ll ride you over by,” he laughs to himself, “what we like to call Snob Hill.”
As Junior and Ms. Mary Ellen note, the establishment of Lee academy corresponded
1970’s white residents began moving out of the Oakhurst neighborhood to the
northwestern edge of town, and, more commonly, out of Clarksdale altogether. Between
1990 and 2013, Oakhurst lost about 70 percent of its white residents. This pattern of
“white flight” is observed for every other neighborhood district in Clarksdale, save for the
“Snob Hill” (see Table 6) neighborhood that Junior references. Located in the northwestern
corner of town, Snob Hill saw a roughly 70-perent increase in its white residents between
has been the exodus of white residents from town altogether. In 1970, Clarksdale had
about 10,000 white residents. By 1980, nearly a fifth of them had moved away. By 1990,
that figure had risen above 25 percent. In 2013, the number was approaching 70 percent, a
figure that far surpassed the average for every other county in the Central Delta region and
the same time period that Clarksdale lost the majority of its white residents, the number of
black residents increased by about 20 percent. Further, there was tremendous reshuffling
46
experienced some magnitude of white and black population loss between 1990 and 2013,
with one exception: Oakhurst, which saw near-exponential growth in black residents.
Indeed, between 1990 and 2013, Oakhurst’s racial portrait nearly flipped. It was virtually
all-white in 1990 and only about 30 percent white by 2013. Ms. Mary Ellen sums it up well.
“We came in—I guess it was in there in the ‘70’s—and right when we got in…seem like
“People can’t have access to the things they need.”: Clarksdale’s Public Infrastructure
Further along Madison Avenue, Junior and I approach a shuttered building. “That
carwash ain’t been a carwash in a long time,” Junior comments, easing onto his breaks as
we get closer. “Most of your issues you run into here [in Clarksdale] are because people are
poor or because people can’t have access to things they need. You look at these right here,”
he lifts a finger from the steering wheel. “Probably in the last ten years—or, I guess it’s
been longer (ago) than that—they built that carwash into some apartments and put it in
with these right here,” Junior explains as we pass a set of four duplexes. “Look like folks still
living in ‘em too!” As we near the end of Madison, he again references Clarksdale’s civic
infrastructure. “You live here, and some of the most basic stuff you can think of, people
don’t have.”
Here, Junior extends his commentary beyond Clarksdale’s opportunity structure and
demographic profile to include the local civic infrastructure. He cites the enduring scarcity
of even the most basic healthcare, childcare, and housing needs. Native resident Otha Mae
47
“When I had (the stroke), they didn’t even know it until five days later. Five days!”
Otha Mae, 49, had suffered a massive stroke and fallen unconscious while working her
normal swing shift at an area manufacturing plant. “If I’d’ve went [to a hospital]
somewhere else, like Oxford, like Southaven, even Cleveland, they’d’ve caught it. They
would have saw that I had had a stroke, and I wouldn’t be in the shape I was in.” She scoffs
at her initial treatment regimen. “The Doctor (would) come in, all they do is give me shots,
hook me to a IV, and every morning he come there, he’ll feel my right ankle, and boom, he
would leave.”
Three years removed from the stroke, Otha Mae still walks with a noticeable limp
and, at times, slurs and stumbles over her words. While she is insured through a meager
benefits package from her job, she often has to arrange to travel outside of Clarksdale for
treatment. During the time of our interview, she was preparing for two months of intensive
speech and physical therapy, cause for both excitement and dismay.
“[When] I get done with that [therapy], you ain’t gon’ be able to tell me nothing!”
She laughs; then, as her face settles, she explains that because Clarksdale’s local hospital
offers no such services, she will have to travel to Cleveland, a 100-mile drive roundtrip. “I
got to get family to take me because I can’t drive that far by myself…I tell you, it’s just hard
“THE DELTA HAS THE BLUES.”: A NEW DEVELOPMENT AGENDA IN THE DELTA
48
In the Mississippi Delta, “going through the blues,” is as much a literal designation as
it is a metaphorical one. Since the late 1970’s, Blues music and performance have become
synonymous with civic life in the Delta. While the blues is popular in other places, whether
Buddy Guy’s in Chicago or Memphis’s Beale Street, most historical and popular
commentary point to the Delta as the music’s “birthplace” (Palmer 1982). The “King of the
Blues” hailed from, and now rests in, a small Delta town; most blues origin stories begin
with Alabama native son W.C. Handy at a railroad station in Tutwiler (e.g., Palmer 1982);
and the story of Robert Johnson selling his soul at the crossroads of highway 61 and 49 in
Clarksdale—the site of the crossroad monument—is perhaps the most widely told blues
myth of them all (Wald 2004). Further, representations of the blues in popular culture
often feature the spatial aesthetics of the Delta—rurality, greenness, flatness (Jones 2007).
However, for many towns in the region the importance of the blues is about more than
history and heritage, culture and the crossroads. State and local elected officials, public
stakeholders, business owners, and grassroots blues enthusiasts have come to view the
blues as a pathway both through and out of the region’s development crisis, a way to make
the Delta new—into a place where the shadows of poverty and lack are recast in the haze of
neon-lit juke joints; the weight of Old South racism swallowed up amidst cosmopolitan
crowds of drunken, dancing festivalgoers; and the chasm left by decades of population loss
filled with waves of blues travelers and bohemians stopping along the “Blues Highway.”
From the State Capital: The Rise of Blues Tourism in the Mississippi Delta
49
“The Delta has the blues,” Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour boasted. Just a few
weeks before the 2004 legislative session was set to close, Barbour had entered the
rotunda of the Mississippi State Capital, grinning slightly, donning thick sunglasses in an
attempt to “produce a blues musician attitude” 11. “(The blues gives us) the opportunity to
take something of which we are very proud and turn it into a genuine economic
Mississippi Blues Commission, an organization that had been conceived of in 2003 and
tasked with helping procure financial and programmatic support to expand the state’s
Two years after endorsing the Commission, Barbour visited Holly Ridge, a small
Delta community in Sunflower County. The day marked the unveiling of the first
Mississippi Blues Trail marker, a tribute to Delta Blues legend Charlie Patton. The Trail,
which now includes nearly two hundred markers between Memphis, Tennessee and the
Mississippi Gulf Coast, was a part of the Commission’s founding vision, and the inaugural
interpretive marker was viewed as a sign of promise. “The blues are a powerful part of
Mississippi’s heritage and America’s musical history.” Barbour’s remarks at the unveiling
echoed his refrain from the floor of the State Capital. “The creation of the Mississippi Blues
Trail is an appropriate way to capture this distinct part of our history and culture, and also
11 Flanagan, Sylvia P. “Bill Creates Mississippi Blues Commission.” JET Magazine, May 17, 2004.
12 “Hardwell, Byrd. “Mississippi Governor Signs Bill to Create Blues Commission.” AP, 2004.
http://jacksonville.com/tu-online/apnews/stories/042604/D826OAA81.shtml.
13
“Haley Barbour Unveils First Marker of Mississippi Blues Trail.” Jazz News, March 13, 2017.
http://home.nestor.minsk.by/jazz/news/2006/12/1303.html.
50
Prior to the establishment of the Mississippi Blues Commission, the Delta’s blues
tourism infrastructure had largely been the work of a niche group of blues enthusiasts and
(MACE), a small, Delta-based grassroots organization partnered with blues enthusiasts and
musicians near Greenville to organize the Mississippi Delta Blues Festival (King 2011), the
first modern festival in the region. These efforts emerged in tandem with a burgeoning
national revival in commercial interest in the blues. Whereas there had been little mention
of the blues in national commentary since the folk and rock-n-roll revivals of the 1960’s
(Petrus and Cohen 2015; Wald 2004), beginning in the late 1970’s, national publications
brimmed with talk of a blues “rebirth.” Mark Kernis notes in a 1978 edition of the
Washington Post, “There are two distinct blues traditions, and both are getting a revitalized
reprieve.”14
The 1980’s saw a groundswell of support and interest in the blues, both in the Delta
and nationally. The blues festival became a fixture of cultural scenes across the nation, from
the “Blues and Gospel Festival” at the Lincoln Center in New York, and blues musicians,
from Muddy Waters to John Hammond, were playing in cities from Miami and Washington
D.C. to Toronto, London, and Niafenke, Mali. In the Delta, the festival circuit continued to
expand. The 1983 Mississippi Delta Blues Festival attracted some 30,000 attendees in just
its fifth year, and, noting this success, other towns in the region organized their own
festivals. This was also a time in which the blues became a fixture of American popular
culture. In 1981 Robert Palmer published Deep Blues, chronicling the origins and
development of blues music in the Delta; the Grammy’s announced it’s inaugural “Best
14 Kernis, Mark. “The Blues are Always Handy.” The Washington Post.
51
Traditional Blues Album” award category; and a slate of documentaries were released,
including Mississippi Blues in 1982 and Mississippi Delta Blues in 1985. The multi-million
dollar renovation of Memphis’s Beale Street also contributed to the blues scene in the
Delta, providing a nearby example of the touristic potential of the blues (King 2011).
By 1990, the tourist traffic generated by the Delta’s growing circuit of blues festivals
and entertainment scenes started to catch the attention of elected officials and business
owners in the region. “We’ve discovered the blues is a resource that could be pushed for
tourism,”15 noted an archivist at the University of Mississippi’s Blues Archive, which had
been founded in 1984. Elsewhere, John Horn, Mississippi’s associate director of tourism
noted, “We’re beginning to see and understand the treasure in our hands.” In 1993,
germinated.”16 Officials put these optimistic pronouncements into action too, taking the
that Governor Haley Barbour reconstituted the Blues Commission. His decision signaled a
new social and economic development agenda in the region and spawned a wave of
private investors to organize and expand the already-bustling yearly schedule of blues
festivals; budgets for planning and organizing blues performance events spiked; Billboards
15 Lewington, Jennifer. “Mississippi cashes in as its living treasures keep singin’ the blues.” The Globe and
Mail.
16 Hamilton, William. B. “Return of the Native Blues: In Clarksdale, Miss., an American Art Form Comes Full
52
sprang up along the bypass, local elected officials began planning the construction of a
Visitor’s Center. Media profiles, travelogues, and tourism brochures touted the Delta as the
“Land of the Blues,” and an already substantial flow of tourists increased even more. These
visitors, largely white and international drifters, bohemians, and blues enthusiasts, flocked
to the region along Highway 61, widely referred to as the “Blues Highway,” and lodged at
venues like the Blues Hound Flat or in renovated sharecropper shacks at the Shack Up Inn
in Clarksdale. They toured the region’s heritage sites, from B.B. King’s home in Itta Bena, to
the inaugural Mississippi Blues Trail Marker in Holly Ridge; danced the growing itinerary
of blues clubs, juke joints, and festivals; and sampled from a variety of “down-home,” often
blues-themed, delicacies—a Delta Tamale, a “Muddy Waters” root beer float, a “Jukin’ Blues
Burger.”
1994; Hamlin 2012; Woods 1998). In addition to the devastating impact on the local
infrastructure suffered. Most notably, the downtown square transitioned from bastion of
regional civic life to a middling cluster of furniture and convenience stores. The largest
buildings, such as the Alcazar Hotel, the Paramount Theater, and the Freight Depot station,
had significantly reduced their operations, and most of the specialty shops and department
stores had closed. The shuttering of downtown was accelerated by the introduction of “Big
53
Box” retail stores on State Street along Clarksdale’s southern border, and by 1990, the
transition had run its course. The once-vibrant downtown square was crowded with
boarded storefronts and vacated building structures. The blues offered a powerful and
timely corrective.
The first and most notable manifestation of the blues revival in Clarksdale came in
1979 when Sid Graves, a native resident, outfitted a small wing in Clarksdale’s Carnegie
Public Library with items from his own collection of blues memorabilia, marking the
founding of the Delta Blues Museum. A year later, Jim O’Neal who had moved to the area
from Chicago, founded Rooster Blues Records, a middling record label that operated out of
rented space near the downtown square. While Clarksdale was a central player in the early
years of the region’s blues revival, it did not host its first blues festival, the Sunflower River
Banks Blues and Gospel Festival, until 1987. In the preceding few years, local enthusiasts
and organizers had contended with skepticism and reticence among local officials (King
2011). While some residents and local organizations, including the Downtown Merchants
Association and Chamber of Commerce, supported the idea of a bringing a festival to town,
officials expressed reservations about tourists seeing the “black parts of town” 17, and they
did not want an event promoting the public consumption of alcohol (King 2011). Despite
these mixed feelings, the festival proved successful, attracting more than a thousand
If the meager origins of the Delta Blues Museum marked the precipitating event in
Clarksdale’s blues revival, the success of the Sunflower Festival showed that the blues
17
Sylvester W. Oliver. 1980. “Local Folk Singer-an Unsung Legend.” Clarksdale, Mississippi: Carnegie Public
Library.
54
might have staying power, a trend recognized by Jim O’Neal, who, amidst the success of
Rooster Records, had decided to open a record store. “When we came here and tried to tell
some of the local civic leaders about some of the tourism possibilities of the blues, they
thought we were crazy,”18 noted O’Neal when reflecting on the early years of the blues
revival. “There was a time when they just ignored the blues, but you can’t ignore it when
people are coming from Belgium.” Residents also took note, joining together to raise money
for the Delta Blues Museum. The museum’s founder Sid Graves celebrated the changing
local sensibility:
“I think the people in this town are taking notice. They’re asking, ‘Why are all
these people from Europe, Japan and elsewhere coming here?’ Recently,
we’ve had the city fathers pass a resolution in honor of Muddy Waters and
the blues. We’re talking to them about having musicians play on the
sidewalks, and there are live blues shows already in several outdoor
locations.’”19
The growth and successes of the 1980’s were bookended by the news of a $100,000 gift to
18 Hamilton, William B. 1992. “Return of the Native Blues: In Clarksdale, Mississippi an American Art form
55
In the early 1990’s, travel and lifestyle magazines began touting Clarksdale as a
destination, inviting a growing stream of tourists and revenue. In 1991, the Sunflower
Festival, then in only its fifth year, attracted some 7,000 visitors21, media crews began
targeting local venues for production projects 22, and the Delta Blues Museum expanded its
memorabilia collection. In line with steadily increasing popularity and consumer demand,
guest-cottages known as the “Shack Up Inn”23. The Shack Up Inn branded itself as gateway
to the region’s past, offering “blues lovers making the pilgrimage to the cradle of the
when it was a working plantation” 24 under the slogan, “The Ritz we ain’t.”
In 1999, through a combination of its own regional popularity and the conjoined
efforts of donations, state funds, and private donations 25, the Delta Blues Museum moved
into its own space, moving from the local library to the newly-renovated Freight Depot
Station on the downtown square. By 2000, local officials and stakeholders related to the
town’s tourism infrastructure were essentially fine-tuning what had proven to be a well-
oiled commerce machine. Seeking to further reify the town’s deeply-entrenched branding
21
Hamilton, William B. 1992. “Return of the Native Blues: In Clarksdale, Mississippi an American Art form
Comes Full Circle.”
22 Ibid.
23 Murray, Charles Shaar. 2001. “Friday Review: Highway 61 Resurrected.” The Guardian (London).\
56
as a quintessential blues place, officials renamed several spaces on the downtown square to
emphasize their connection to the blues. During this time, a five-block stretch of Delta
Avenue on the downtown square became the “Blues Alley”; a side street was dedicated to
local bluesman John Lee Hooker, and a spring of clubs (re)opened all around the
downtown square: Club Vegas became the Delta Blues Alley Café; the Blues Station Café
opened in the lobby of the Old Greyhound Station; mayor Carl White and native Morgan
Freeman partnered on two projects, “Madidi,” a fine-dining restaurant and “Ground Zero,” a
“nightclub with the look and feel of an authentic Delta juke joint, save for its modern rest-
room facilities”26.
Indeed, what had been a remarkably successful, nearly uninterrupted, rise for
Clarksdale’s blues tourism scene essentially since the inaugural Sunflower festival in 1987
became a blues “boom” in the early 2000’s. By some estimates, Coahoma County was
clearing some $20,000 per month, a conservative figure that was virtually all a credit to
Clarksdale’s popularity27. And, even while some officials remained skeptical, especially
about how the town would manage its commercial growth and financial successes, the
prevailing narrative was one of optimism—optimism that lasted for much of the remaining
2000’s. Nationally, the blues was as popular as ever—Congress had declared 2003 the
“Year of the Blues” (King 2011), and as I have noted, state legislators had given their full
endorsement at the regional level. Locally, the growth and expansion rolled on. In 2004,
Madidid and Ground Zero were featured on the Food Network 28, and a slate of commercial
27 Hood-Adams, Rebecca. 2002. “Blues venues generate needed revenues for city.” Clarksdale Press Register.
28 Neff, Ali. 2004. Clarksdale attractions appear on Food Network. Clarksdale Press Register.
57
businesses, including a new Wal-Mart, and chain restaurants opened along State Street. For
the first time in decades, there was even activity on the town’s development front. Planners
executed phase one of a multi-year plan to build several subdivisions in town, elected
officials spoke of a coming Interstate project that promised jobs and the possibility of even
more tourist traffic and revenue, and Delta Wire, one of Clarksdale’s largest and longest-
running employers, announced that it would remain open after years of rumored layoffs
and closure.
Most recently, local officials have taken a more systematic approach to measuring
the importance of blues tourism to the local economy. In 2008, the town hired a
development and research firm to develop an economic action plan for downtown
Clarkdale, on one hand, to suggest a set of best-practices for local businesses to ensure
their continued success and, on the other, to measure how far they had come. The firm
documented 60 businesses, buildings, and other entities on the downtown square that
shared some relationship with the blues, and noted that blues-related businesses
accounted for half of all downtown commercial activity (the other half coming from antique
shops, tailors, hairdressers, law firms, accountants, and insurance agencies). Importantly,
the firm also noted that blues tourism was contributing about $20 million annually to
Clarksdale’s economy (Henshall 2012). Indeed, tourism had proven a lucrative venture for
Clarksdale, and had even begun to show promise at the state level. Estimates from 2012
suggested that tourism was generating nearly $6 billion annually, a figure that translated to
a nearly $2 billion payroll, and $4.2 million in-state and local taxes.
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closed in 2012, while Ground Zero has proven the most popular club in the region—the
sense of optimism around blues tourism among elected officials, while more tempered than
before, remains.
“Blues is our greatest export, it’s probably our greatest export, though I wouldn’t say
it’s our biggest industry” I had been sitting with Mayor White for nearly an hour, prepared
with an extensive list of questions, his long-windedness preventing me from asking many
of them. “The economy, generally around this area, is still driven by agriculture. That’s a
shrinking industry, but I don’t think it’ll ever die away. So you’ve got agriculture and the
related businesses to agriculture. Then, after that, you probably have casinos. Look to
Tunica for that…But, somewhere down the line, you get to tourism, these out-of-town
visitors,” he gestures with his hands, as if impelling me to imagine a room full of people.
“(Tourism) is a segment that’s green and creative and easy and doesn’t take
infrastructure…It doesn’t take new buildings and factories and all that. Tourists come in
and spend their money, and that’s very helpful…They don’t have a downside.”
development crisis has reshaped community life, limiting the opportunities and civic
services for residents like Biggs, Black, and Otha Mae. On the other hand, a blues revival
prompted optimism and excitement among local stakeholders and officials. In their view,
the blues was making the Delta new—into a place where the shadows of poverty and lack
were being recast in the haze of neon-lit juke joints; the weight of Old South racism
of demographic decline replaced by waves of blues travelers and bohemians stopping along
59
the “Blues Highway.” For black residents, this part of the story was different, and so was the
blues.
60
Chapter 2: “I still don’t like the blues.”: Blues Memories of Experience
“You define the blues by what you been through,” Rick explains plainly, matter-of-
factly, almost with an air of reproach. “Somebody else might define it different from me.” A
45-year-old native of Clarksdale, Rick has witnessed the blues revitalization campaign from
its early-growth days in the 1980’s to its most active years in the early 2000’s. He smirks at
“I had a friend who writes music,” he continues, “and he was go’n’ tell me what the
blues was. He said you (have to) to have so many notes, so many beats…whatever that
meant.”
“Okay. And, how do you define the blues?” I repeat the question.
He sighs, now looking blankly to a corner of the room, a small office in a building
“I’ll tell you…My best friend died in 1997. I lost my job in 1997, got a divorce in
1997, dropped out of school [college] in 1997, and you see that bus up there?” He shifts his
attention to a photograph of a school bus hanging just above his desk. “I moved in that bus
in 1997, lived in that bus just the way you see it there.” Rick’s office is checkered with
posters and handbills—an old high school football schedule, a map outlining county voting
districts, an obituary of an old black woman wearing pearls—but the dull polaroid, of a
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“Can I look?” My voice cracks quietly.
Rick peers at the picture intently, as if expecting it to speak for him. “Go ‘head.” He
nods.
The bus sits amidst weeds and hay bales, its underbelly sunken into the ground.
“You talk’nbout mosquitos? Ooooh, weee! I had to put a quilt over the front of that bus to
keep ‘em out…When it was 90 degrees outside, it was 115 (degrees) in that bus,” Rick
continues as I stand at the wall, still studying the picture. “I would have to go hang out in
the club…or [the pool hall] until it cooled down. Then, I come home right there to that bus.”
“My momma come and saw it [the school bus], and they told me she broke down,”
he stops himself. “It hurt her.” A heavy silence rings over the room. “And, be honest with
you, that’s what pulled me out. They told me it broke her, and that broke me…So, I left.”
“It was a tough time, but it was a lot of thinking time too.” A firm, if guarded, air of
hopefulness emerges in Rick’s voice. “But, you learn from it. You learn from those struggle
times just like you do the high times, and that’s the blues.” After a brief moment of pause,
he continues. “That’s why when you say ‘how do I define the blues,’ I define the blues as, to
me, going through them hard times back in the day—going through ‘em, and learning from
‘em, and then getting’ out of ‘em before they get too deep on you.”
The room falls quiet again, Rick’s attention caught by a distant memory. “Do we
wan’a remember that? Yeah. We had fun…running up and down those ditches, we had fun
fishing (snakes) out’f the river…all that. It was fun.” Rick laughs through vivid memories of
“just being outside,” play-fighting with fallen tree limbs, and riding bikes with his favorite
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cousins. He then returns his attention to me. “But, do we wan’a remember that, being poor
and struggling and doing bad like that? Naw…we ain’t that [there] no mo’…My daddy an’em
[and them] certainly not. They not coming out to your (blues) festival or to Moonies or to
Rick’s sentiments are emblematic of all but a few exchanges that I had with black
residents of Clarksdale. With varying degrees of reticence and disdain, they dismissed the
blues as an appealing music genre and performance style. It made Kingfish and Super
Chikan rock and shake, but it did not move them. It had brought Muddy Waters and R.L.
Burnside fame and acclaim, but it did not fit their taste. It echoed almost daily from
Moonies and the Blues Alley but not in their homes or on their dials. For them, “blues”
played differently. In the opening exchange, Rick cavalierly dismissed his friend’s attempt
personal account of his time being homeless in 1997. He followed that by referencing an
earlier time of being poor and struggling, fishing and playing in ditches. Indeed, when he
concluded, “we ain’t the blues no mo’,” he was commenting on these blues memories, not
collective definitions of the blues. In particular, I recount the stories that residents shared
when describing and reflecting on what the blues was and whether they liked it or not. I
demonstrate that for the vast majority of residents, the blues connoted an “environment of
memory” (Nora 1989)—that is, a system of social-cognitive cues and material objects that
“something that happened to me in the past” and, as such, often interpreted my requests to
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“define the blues” or “talk about the blues” as an invitation to reflect on an experience, not a
When reflecting on their blues memories, some residents cited feelings of pride and
accomplishment, claiming that the blues harkened back to a simpler, if difficult, time and
embodied the best of black (southern) imagination and ingenuity. Other residents offered
testimonies of enduring and overcoming hardship. Almost always, though, they concluded
with a familiar and resounding sentiment: the blues was something they did not like, that
they had moved beyond. Such statements of dislike and dismissal, I posit, are not
necessarily, or at least not only, fixed on musical preference. Rather, they are cultivated
circumstances and future possibilities in and on their own terms, to negotiate the past as
they see fit. Indeed, residents are reiterating elements of a blues epistemology, blurring and
humanistic autonomy.
“YOU DEFINE THE BLUES BY WHAT YOU BEEN THROUGH”: BLUES MEMORIES (OF EXPERIENCE)
“I know the blues.” I am sitting on the small front porch of Essie Dee Lyles, a 52-
year-old native resident. Widowed now for six years, Essie Dee lives by herself in a small
and tidy home in the Roundyard. It is a cool August evening in Clarksdale, a rarity. Clear
skies, a slight breeze, and a felt energy among residents provide a welcomed respite from
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the typical Delta summer day of sun and heat and not much else. Young people laugh and
play in the shadows of trees and behind the gates of broken fences. Older folks shout one
another down in laughter and with curses, often amidst wisps of white smoke seeping from
barbecue grills.
“The blues came out of that time when we was just, what you call, just schooching
by.” She swipes her hand along her thigh with a laugh. “We didn’t have much, I ‘clare we
ain’t have much—still ain’t got much—but really ain’t have much then; but you know what
I had interacted with Essie Dee only a few times—we had crossed paths periodically
at the same early-morning church service —but today she seems especially familiar. “My
momma always says (the same thing), that they didn’t have much (when she was growing
up), but that they didn’t want for much either,” I share with her.
“And, that’s right,” she agrees, almost reflexively. “We didn’t! But, you know, we
always had food. We’d go to the refrigerator, and there was something to eat in there, go to
the stove and there was something to eat when it was time to eat… I don’t even know if you
could say it was a full meal, but it was always food to eat, and you were never going to bed
saying, ‘I didn’t eat anything.’” Essie Dee whips a small washcloth by her ear. She had been
gripping it since my arrival, apparently to ward off mosquitos and gnats or, as she did
several times in the hour or so that we talked, waive at passing cars. “Momma made sure of
that,” she continues. “She was creative, like, with the things she cooked. I think back on it
sometimes now, like, ‘Momma, that go with spaghetti?” She laughs at a passing memory
65
Her story precipitates a humorous exchange about the particularities of black
debate. We talk hot sauce—Louisiana or Red Hot’s—and, to her dismay, I admit that I have
never had sweet potato cobbler. As our laughter settles, she turns to a place of reflection,
her face suddenly still, her eyes looking to the pale-gray paneling of an old house across the
street. “But, you know, those are things you never wan’a go back to. You take the lesson
from ‘em and move on…Pastor say you eat the meat and leave the bones.”
“What do you learn from that, from those times? What is the meat that you take
“Humble,” she answers without hesitation or misgiving. “You learn to be humble and
to be thankful.” She stops to reflect on her answer and, after deciding that she is satisfied,
continues. “One thing my momma would always say that I still carry with me to this day is
that a good run is better than a hard fall…Do right by people, and the goodness will come
back to you in two. I think that’s one thing we learn, is just to do good by people. Be a good
Essie Dee’s provides perhaps the clearest example how a reference to or question
about the blues on my part often served as a prompt for a broader conversation about past
experience. Essie’s opening assertion came in response to the question, “what is the
blues?”, and after her opening acknowledgement, she does not mention “blues” again, and
during our exchange, while we she shuffles through memories from her childhood—scenes
with her mother and siblings—she makes no reference to a song or musical sensibility.
Instead, the blues represented a time, or, better put, evoked the memory of a time, when
she and her family—her mother, father, and six siblings—were just “schooching” by. On
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one hand, this brought her to a place of humor and levity. She smiled as she shared
memories of her mom’s cooking ingenuity. She laughed as she remembered the many
nights that she had to cram into a single bed with her four sisters, as she retold stories of
Yet, Essie Dee also took time to reflect on the difficulties of “coming up poor in the
country,” the disappointment of “wanting but not being able to have,” the frustration of
wearing the same clothes to school each week. In these instances, her laughter drifted into
extended periods of quiet reflection, with shouting children and passing cars in the
maintained that she had learned important lessons from her blues experiences. There was
confidence in her voice when spoke of the virtues of remaining humble, of “always having
faith,” of being kind and staying grounded. For her, though, the blues should only be that, a
set of memories and life lessons gleaned from difficult experience. She believed that she
had arrived to a different place, one that was necessarily beyond the blues.
“I will never forget the day we bought this house. Me and my husband had worked,
gosh we had worked for years, just to be able to get this, to get something nice that we
could say was ours.” Essie Dee leans forward, gripping the washcloth now with both hands.
“And, when I get to Heaven, I’mma kick off my shoes!” Pastor Jeremiah Galloway
whips his leg forward, sending a shoe tumbling through the center aisle. It is Good Friday,
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and Pastor Galloway, a 36-year-old native resident, is leading the final night of spring
“I’mma kick off my shoes!” He repeats, again whipping his leg forward. His other
shoe lands just past the fifth pew. One by one, attendees stand to their feet, their
thunderous chorus of “say it, say it!”; “Amen!”; and “Sho’ [sure] right,” accented by the
“Gonna put on my robe!” Pastor Galloway, now standing directly in front of the
pulpit, removes his jacket and casually drops it to his side. He continues the sermon,
moving from spirited directives to sing-song, almost poetic, maxims that I had heard him
repeat on Sundays.
“This city ain’t dead ‘cause if it’s dead you got’to bury it,” he settles into his closing
remarks. “And, after you bury it, it’s gone. And, we too tough to be buried. We too tested to
The following day, I meet Pastor Galloway in his office, a room in the front on the
corner of his church, filled with books and old pictures, a sprawling desk, and an unduly
comfortable couch. Before either of us have time to exchange pleasantries, I joke, “So you
came up out the shoes! You had to come up out the shoes!” He shows a wide smile and
laughs to himself quietly. “Let’s start with that. Tell me about that. Do you remember doing
any of that?”
“To be honest with you, I didn’t remember it…I didn’t. It wasn’t choreographed or a
planning thing. I was there in the moment, and I think,” he stops himself. “I asked my wife,”
he laughs, amused by some unspoken thought. “I asked my wife, and she said, ‘Baby, you
realize you threw your shoes!’ And, I asked her, I say, ‘Baby, what was I saying?’ And, she
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was like, ‘You were talking about going to Heaven, and you were singing that old hymn and
talking about a new robe, and new shoes, and the next thing I know, I saw your shoes!’”
The wall behind Pastor Galloway is a gallery. Pictures of his wife, four children, and
late father abound, and his three college degrees, along with several award plaques, hang
“You’re a storyteller,” I reflect on other sermons that I have heard Pastor Galloway
deliver. “You weave your personal stories from stuff you’ve gone through with wisdoms
from your father, your grandparents…(and) you talk about the importance of the old
hymns, like Mrs. Regina mentioned. Why is it so important for you to hold on to those old
want to be able to meet people where they are…I use modern cultural things, or things that
people are looking at anyway and try to relate them to what I’m saying…or what I want to
say. But, at the same time, I want them to be married to that old church. I want them to at
least know where we come from. [Spirituals and old hymnals] play a part in our African
American history and culture…just like your rap—the Juke Joint Festival next weekend—
“I wanted to ask you about that,” I smile. “The blues. What is that? What is the
blues?”
Pastor Galloway looks down at his desk, his lips pushed out slightly. “The blues is
struggle,” he says plainly, confidently. “The blues is, ‘you went through that too?” His voice
rises sharply, nearly to a shout. “The blues is, I just came home from a 16-hour shift and
found my wife in the bed with my brother, and when she left me, she took my dog.” The
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serious tone of his voice belies the levity of his comment. “The blues is,” he takes a shallow
breath, “my granddaddy died at 46, my daddy died at 50 with a 90 percent blockage; I’m
36, and we got the same heart condition, so I got’to set my clock backwards…Time run
I settle back into the couch as he continues. “The blues represents the strivings from
the valley. What you was going through at yo’ darkest hour, when you thought you wasn’t
go’n make it, when you thought the battle was lost,” a smile creeps across his face. “And,
gospel is the hope that brought the faith that brought the promise that saw you out of that
valley. Gospel…is what we turn to when we get to that point where we sick of being down
While Pastor Galloway recognizes the blues as a music form, and further as an
sense, it connotes a generalized notion of struggle, even more, a type of cumulative struggle
in which bad gets worse and worse leads to the worst. From this generalized conception of
the blues as struggle, however, Pastor Galloway moves to the personal—or, the blues as my
struggle. We had spoken several times already, each time in his office, and each time he had
shared stories about his father who had died of a heart attack several years prior. In this
case, my asking what the blues was became another opportunity for him to call up the
memory of his father and, further, to link his father’s health conditions to his own. He then
turns to the metaphorical “valley,” equating the blues to a set of collective experiences, or
“strivings,” and positioning gospel as the salvation from those strivings. Importantly, even
as he plays on gospel and the “old hymns,” he is equating the blues with already-lived
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“It’s realistic to me.”
Several other residents echoed Pastor Galloway, opting to draw on other black
expressive forms to help draw out their appraisals of the blues. Younger residents cycled
through a catalog of rap artists, from Big K.R.I.T. to Triple Six. Older residents found
Maxwell. The most-cited musical counterpoint was southern soul. Residents insisted, even
against my contrived protestations, that southern soul was different from and better than
the blues, that, musically, Son House and Bobby Rush were barely distant cousins, that “the
“blues and southern soul is just different,” that “I Can’t be Satisfied” was a long cry from
“Friday Night Fish Fry.” Indeed, whereas residents assigned the “blues” label to the guitar-
and harmonica-driven, slow-paced, guttural music often heard bellowing from the
downtown square,29 they saw southern soul as lighter, smoother, and as Minnie
“I like southern soul more because it’s more realistic to me,” she emphasizes “me”
sternly.
“The blues is about stuff you go through too,” I raise my voice slightly, hoping she
senses the sarcasm in my counterpoint. “You got Muddy Waters,” I laugh, “Bessie Smith,
“Now thoooooose,” her voice shakes. “I’ll listen to thooooseee, but I guess because
southern soul has more of a beat, and they singing about relationships and about going out
29 Wald (2004) and Jones (2007) problematize such reductive characterizations of the blues.
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on Friday night or going to the casino, and that older [blues] just go on and on ‘duh-da-duh-
da-duh,’” she imitates a guitar riff—in particular, the familiar melody from Bo Diddley’s
“I’m a Man” and, more recently, “Bad to the Bone” by Thorogood and the Destroyers’ ‘Bad
to the Bone. As she continues, her confidence returns. “I’ll listen to Bobby Bland or Johnnie
Like Minnie, black Clarksdalians reserved the “southern soul” moniker for the
lighter, more upbeat subgenre of soul music that became popular in the 1960’s and 1970’s
Deep South with the Memphis Stax sound—artists like Johnnie Taylor, Carla Thomas, and
the Staples Singers (Bowman and Bowman 2000; Gordon 2015; Guralnick 1999; Hughes
2015; Whiteis 2013). These residents claiming the superiority of southern soul asserted
that what the blues sound lacked—a smoother beat and more layered production—the
southern soul aesthetic had in scores. Yet, just as residents cited a host of personal,
experiential, and mnemonic factors when explaining their dislike for the blues, the appeal
of southern soul was more than musical. Indeed, before Minnie mentioned the sound of
southern soul, she noted that its themes resonated with her and even as I suggested a
similar capacity in the blues, she kept with her stance that southern soul was better.
While the vast majority of black Clarksdalians dispensed with the blues, not all of
them dismissed it completely. They highlighted the good and the bad. Whether the freedom
of playing outside or the fellowship of spending time with family, residents routinely noted
the affirming elements of their blues memories. Yet, while most residents returned to and
reiterated their statements of dislike, a few kept with a focus on the positive, on the
redeeming.
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“Black superhero.”
It is the Thursday before Clarksdale’s Juke Joint Festival, and I am sitting in Delta
Brook, a newly-renovated, modern café on the downtown square. While the festival’s
official kickoff is a day away, there are already scatters of patrons milling about—white
women walking and pointing just beyond the restaurant’s windows, all with serious faces;
white men sitting and standing in pockets of shade on the sidewalk. Inside, Delta Brook is
not as full as I anticipate, though there is a larger and livelier crowd than usual. The
restaurant’s booths bustle with the mutter of women and men, again all of them white, and
all of them bearing the signs of newly-arrived visitors. They wear visors and hats and carry
large totes. They shuffle through pictures on phones and cameras, while excitedly sharing
their plans for the weekend. Not long after I arrive, I notice a black woman and man enter
and place their orders at the front register. They survey the space and eventually make
their way in my direction. I acknowledge them and continue working. In short order, they
“You a writer? Because you typing like you some kind’of writer,” the man leans in
my direction and says in a low grumbling tenor. He introduces himself as Big Danny, a 56-
year-old native resident. The woman introduces herself as Kathereen, 51, also a native
resident. A few minutes in, and they are laughing and talking with me as if they have known
me for years.
“That’s what I’m talkin’bout! Come on down to this Delta. We go’n’ teach you
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Not sure exactly what to say, I offer a light-hearted challenge. “What y’all go’n’ teach
me?”
“What you done heard about Early Wright?” He quips back with little hesitation, as if
prepared for my follow-up, as if he had wanted to shift the conversation in this direction all
along.
“You mean you been here,” he stops himself and redirects his comment to
Kathereen, who has been smiling and laughing at Big Danny’s act, lending an occasional
eyeroll and dismissive sigh. “This man been here all this time, and I still got to tell him ‘bout
Early Wright!” He exaggerates a deep sigh and winks his eye with the weight of his whole
body.
Kathereen smiles, first at him and then at me. “Early Wright was a DJ. The Soul Man.”
“Damn right, the Soul Man! A black superhero!” Danny returns a half-eaten chicken
tender to his plate and pounds the table flatly. “A black superhero. The first black DJ in the
United States, damn sho’ [sure] in the South anyway. He from Clarksdale!
As Big Danny notes, Early Wright was a Clarksdale-based disc jockey. While not the
first black DJ in the U.S., Wright was Mississippi’s first lead announcer, spending much of
his career selling ad slots and playing the airwaves for Clarksdale’s WROX-AM. Wright
began at the station in 1945 while managing a gospel act, but eventually rose to popularity
as “The Soul Man,” a testament to his connection to the rise of soul music in the 1960’s. Still,
Wright had been responsible for playing and recruiting any number of blues musicians to
Clarksdale.
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“He brought Elvis Presley to Clarksdale! James Brown. (He) played Ike Turner,
Muddy Waters, Son House, all them. Had this place boomin’!” For Big Danny, Early Wright’s
expertise as a radio DJ was not the only way that Clarksdale had been “boomin’” over the
years. “Back (when Early Wright was getting started), Clarksdale was the spot! I’m tellin’
you, Clarksdale was a boomtown back then!” The pitch of his voice rises with each word.
“All the black people in Clarksdale back in the 50’s. You couldn’t work in Clarksdale,
couldn’t have a damn business in Clarksdale if you didn’t like black people.” He pauses
briefly, as if expecting the predominantly white Delta Brook clientele to call back to him in
protest. “It was clubs and businesses all up and down Fourth Street over there. You done
heard of the Black Baseball League [Negro Southern League], that used to play all over the
On one hand, when Big Danny effuses over Early Wright—“he was a black
superhero”; “he had this place boomin’”—he is making a personal claim, motivated by his
own pride and gratitude for Wright’s status and accomplishments, and consistent with
other residents, he reads his own personal narrative and sensibilities onto this
commentary. On the other hand, Big Danny is reflecting a broader belief about the
interconnectedness of blues history and the generalized notion of black collective lived
experience in Clarksdale. For older residents like Danny, Early Wright is more than an
accomplished DJ and formative figure in the grand narrative of the Delta Blues. He is an
emblem of black cultural resilience and achievement, both a harbinger of future possibility
and a revenant of past accomplishment. In the same way that Rick Sutton imagines “blues”
as a set of difficult, if instructive, personal experiences, Big Danny uses “Early Wright” as a
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stand-in for the redeeming elements of black history, referencing a period of presumed
Pearl Younger, 54, is one of three residents that I spoke with who expressed an open
and unguarded preference for the blues. On one hand, her perspective, which runs counter
to the overwhelming pattern of blues dislike among residents, is likely explained by her
status as a blues musician and, what is more, a blues musician who had moved to
“I’m a blues musician, to my core, and I came (to Clarksdale) to be in this culture, to
play the blues in this culture.” Born in Chicago, Pearl had moved to the Mississippi Gulf
Coast in 1996 but relocated to Clarksdale after her home was devastated by Hurricane
Pearl and I are cramped in small booth at Cantina, a popular Mexican restaurant just
off State Street. Loud laughter from an adjacent table drowns out parts of our conversation,
She recounts playing music and “doing art” for as long as she can remember, her
areas of expertise now including guitar, drums, banjo, and “dabbling in singing.” After
marveling over her musical range, I ask her to “tell me about the blues.”
“Here is what I tell folks about what the blues is,” she stops herself momentarily to
think, then continues. “The blues is black folks—black folks coming home from church,
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from work, from out, and they chillin’. We chill on the weekend, you know. Momma ‘n’em
get in the kitchen and get to cookin’, and that’s if they didn’t already (start cooking) on
Saturday night. You got your greens, hotwater cornbread, pot of beans, or maybe you got
some barbeque, you know, potato salad, Momma’s specialty.” She talks with an inviting
energy, painting a scene that is equal parts her memory and my imagination. “Somebody
go’n’ make spaghetti. It’s always go’n be some spaghetti in there, some kind’of way.” She
chuckles. “Folks in the kitchen, folks on the porch. You know black folks go’n’ talk shit.
Folks in the big room. Music playing—Curtis Mayfield, some Al Green, some city-slicker
[blues], whatever. Somebody break out a deck of cards. Somebody go’n’ start playing
spades or dominos. It’s predictable. It’s got a beat…And, that’s how I talk about the blues—
it’s the beat, it’s the sound, it’s the feeling…It’s our culture, and that’s what you love about
it.”
Here, Pearl positions “blues” as a stand-in for a set of shared cultural experiences,
from Sunday dinner to Saturday cookouts, from the “big room” to the front porch, from
talking shit to preparing spaghetti and cornbread. Indeed, in Pearl’s view, the blues
embodies both the most sacred and mundane elements of black life. Yet, in explaining
“what the blues is,” Pearl does not rely solely on references to the cultural or humanistic.
Her affinity for the blues is also rooted in its musicological and aesthetic qualities. In her
imagined scene of black folks returning home to food and fellowship, where momma is in
the kitchen and spades games abound, Pearl alludes to “music playing,” and she names both
soul icons, such as Curtis Mayfield, and their “city slicker” predecessors, what she later
clarifies as a dated reference to Chicago-style blues. In this way, Pearl constructs the blues
not just as the substance of black cultural life but also as its soundtrack.
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“I grew up in the Pentecostal church, and when you come up like I did, in that
Pentecostal world, you were really coming up with the blues, especially that Hill County
“Wait, so tell me about hill country…What is hill country?” I interrupt her before she
can continue.
“You don’t know about hill country?” There is a new excitement in her voice. “It’s
different from other blues! It’s got that deep percussive sound, and I love it!” She becomes
preoccupied with her own thoughts, seemingly forgetting for a moment that I am there.
“Hill Country is Holly Springs (Mississippi). (It’s) out of Holly Springs and really just North
Mississippi. It’s a folky, country Blues. It’s kind’of like, you know how Prince and…Time and
all that came out of Minnesota, or Detroit and Motown…Hill Country has that Mississippi
undertone, where you just know it’s Mississippi. It’s the hill country of Mississippi…The
first time I heard it, I went nuts! I’ve always liked blues, but it’s something about hill
“And, you say it sounds like church, like Pentecostal—” I begin, but she quickly cuts
me off.
“Oh my gosh! Oh my goodness. The Pentecostal church is all up in there! It’s very
doomdoom”—and continues with her description. “You got your drums, the piano…You
know when the shouting music comes on. Everybody know shouting music. Eeeeeverybody
know shouting music. You almost feel like you’re in church.” She interrupts herself. “And,
we say it on stage, ‘This is Delta Pearl, and we go’n’ go to church now, y’all. Got my
tambourines!’” With that, Pearl revisits the humming bassline, this time stomping and
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clapping a faster-paced beat. “Doomdoom, doomdoom, doomdoom, doomdoom.” I stomp
both burst into laughter. “And, you got all that rolled up in (hill country blues),” she
continues, “and people can’t help but dance. It’ll make you come up out of your wheel
chair…out your hospital bed…out the casket, out whatever you in!”
Pearl’s affinity for the blues did not stop with the thumping bassline of the hill
country sound or the rush of playing guitar and drums before crowds of dancing blues
enthusiasts. She also positioned herself as a griot, historian, and conservator of Clarksdale’s
blues history. “You know L.C. Ulmer?” She references the now-late Delta blues musician.
“We played that Friday with L.C., with Mr. Ulmer…We went to the Blues Museum (earlier
that day). I brought him to an interview at the Blues Museum, one of those big interviews
that they do, you know. I made him bring his banjo—he was happy to bring it—and he
played it for ‘em.” In explaining her commitment to the blues, Pearl often repeated, “this is
While Pearl’s love of the blues belies the recurrent impulse of I Don’t Like the Blues,
the deeply reflective and personal way in which she describes the blues does not. Before
my ignorance of hill country blues excites her sensibilities, she describes blues as “black
folks,”—that is, a fundamental, irrevocable aspect of black culture, and the scene that she
constructs, while in this case imagined, matches parts of conversations from any number of
other residents. Further, even when Pearl begins to sing the praises of hill country, she
roots it in her own childhood experiences attending Pentecostal churches. Finally, and to be
sure, Pearl celebrated being beyond certain memories of earlier experiences in her life.
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“The blues is about helping each other.” She continues to talk as I drive towards her
home in the Roundyard. “We’re here to help each other, and when you get it, when you
really get it…when you really get it, you don’t talk about it, you just do it. You don’t talk
about it. You just do it, you know. And, people feel it. It’s a conduit for change. You’re a
conduit for change. Life ain’t easy, ain’t been easy for me…ain’t been easy for none of us.
But, you know what you do?” She pauses in rhythm. “You take it all in. You take in the bad,
all the ugly stuff, you know. You breathe it in.” She inhales deeply. I join her. “Then, you
exhale. That’s it. You keep living. You find some peace in it…You let the process heal you.”
The epistemological move that black Clarksdalians made when talking about the
maps onto a broader sensibility expressed among residents. They routinely reflected on
memories from their life with a sense of gratitude and humility, all while maintaining that
“Oh, we was just country when we got here,” Janice Green, 59, who insists that I call
her “Auntie,” laughs herself into a deep coughing spell. “We was po’ [poor], and we was
A self-proclaimed “domestic homemaker,” Auntie spent the early part of her life in
the nearby unincorporated community of Lurand, and has been living in Clarksdale since
her mother decided to move them, a family of eight, to “the city” in 1968.
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“But if you look at us now,” she claps a single time, her tone growing light. “Coming
from that time where we had to chop cotton, where we was trumping trailors, where we
didn’t have dirt dog nothing…look at us now, and look at us from back then, you wouldn’t
think we was the same people because, you know…we were poor. We were poor!” She
repeats more loudly. “We were poor. We were really poor. And, now, you know, we don’t
have much, but…folks will always come back and say, ‘I never thought I would see the day
that y’all and y’all’s children would make it. But, thanks be to God.”
Here, Auntie is reflecting the sensibilities of folks like Doris and Rick, Pastor
Galloway and Essie Dee, acknowledging and, indeed, embracing some aspects of where and
what she had come from (and through), while looking upon where she had now arrived
“It’s two things (that) I say. If I had to live it back, I wouldn’t want to, but if I had to
live it back, I wouldn’t change anything because through it all, you and your family grow,
and you see the grace of God moving. And to look up and see that we made is enough.”
Beyond harmonica shrills and familiar guitar riffs, black Clarksdalians tended to
frame the blues as an environment of memory. When asked to “define the blues” or “talk
about the blues,” black residents almost always made an allusion to past experiences, often
without direct mention of blues music. While these memories typically centered on deeply
personal experiences, there were some cases—as with Big Danny and Pearl—where
“blues” evoked more generalized notions of black culture, identity, and sensibility. And,
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while there were a few residents like Pearl who liked the blues and played the blues—I
spoke with three other black blues musicians—the resounding sentiment was that the
that they had left behind. Doris’s quiet “I don’t like the blues” emerged as “I ain’t never like
that ole blues,” “don’t nobody like no blues,” or in some cases, as with Minnie Carrouthers,
“I like southern soul more.” Rick’s defiant, “We ain’t the blues no mo’” was expressed as “I
don’t listen to the blues like I used to.” In almost all cases, these disapproving
characterizations were directed as much at the memories that the blues evoked as they
Here, residents offer a different way to think about individual and collective
have done important work on the overt and covert “collective silences” of oppressed and
displaced mnemonic communities, their approach is best deployed vis-à-vis the actual or
performative absence of a memory from one’s immediate awareness.. That is to say, others
in this tradition, have studied how and when actual silence emerges around sites of
memory (Zerubavel 1996, 2006). The epistemological work that black Clarksdalians are
accomplishing by not liking the blues is rooted in another place. They are not “forgetting”
or “denying” their memories based on a hope that those memories will eventually
disappear from their own autobiographical, or a broader collective, memory. Rather, they
are actively and intentionally claiming to have moved on to something else. They are
observing and calling out an apparent epistemological discontinuity, between then and
now, between what they used to be and what they have become. They are dispensing with
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a descriptor that no longer seems to fit, a set of experiences and sensibilities that they have
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Chapter 3: “Never been to a blues show.”: Racial and Spatial Lessons Learned
You hear it before you see it—Clarksdale’s Blues Alley—especially on nights like
this, the first of the Hambone Festival. For the next four days, the downtown square will
come alive with blues concerts, sidewalk shows, street vendors, and any number of blues
“jamming” sessions.
I am walking to T-Bone’s, a small blues club in the heart of the Ally, where, according
to the festival schedule, I am sure to hear some of the region’s best hill country blues. I have
attended other blues festivals since moving to Clarksdale, but this will be my first time at a
one of the local juke joints. As I imagine what the night might entail, I am reminded of an
earlier interview with Pearl Younger who spoke highly of the hill country sound:
Hill Country is, like, you on the front porch, the sun is going down, ‘til
in there because that thump, the drums, you know—it calls up all those
From a distance, the Alley sounds like an ensemble—the faint wail of a single guitar
string, the indistinct echo of laughter, the pulsing thump of drums—playing a chorus
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wrought with energy and excitement. Tonight’s show lineup has attracted a lively crowd.
From the dull entrance of the Delta Amusement Café to the flickering neon lights of Ground
Zero, large and small groups of blues enthusiasts mill about, shouting in laughter, walking
in dance, all chasing some unknown fancy. As I get closer to T-Bone’s, my stride slows. The
ballooning figures of several middle-aged white men crowd the sidewalk, partially blocking
the door. Between them, through the dimly-lit entryway, I trace a mass of white faces, some
laughing, some singing, others raising red cups and beer cans to pale lips perched and
waiting. “So much for Africa,” I laugh to myself, reluctantly paying the five-dollar cover
The club has two rooms, one crowded with mismatched tables and chairs, the other
with rowed seating and a bar with two drink options: canned beer and bottled beer.
Tonight, both rooms are at capacity, and the low ceilings amplify the noise levels to a nearly
unbearable volume. Despite my late arrival and the crowded space, I scavenge a small,
unoccupied space along the wall, just a few paces from the headliners, a white, Nashville-
Tennessee-based duo.
“How ya doin’ mane?” I turn to find a member of the kitchen staff, a mid-thirties
black man wearing a bright-orange shirt, leaning near my ear. “If you need anything, I
“Aight [alright], I ‘preciate that.” I answer firmly, studying his face closely for some
sign that we have met before. We lock hands, and he rushes away, ducking beneath the arm
the man until he disappears into the faint darkness of a hidden back room, still wondering
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After the show, the headliners thank everyone for their support and announce that
their merchandise and music will be available for purchase immediately after the show.
Later that night, I meet with Antione “Twon” Shumpert, a 27-year-old native resident, for a
quick trip to the casinos in nearby Tunica County. As we drive, I badger ‘Twon about
standing me up at the hill country show. “Man, I thought you were coming out to T-Bone’s!”
He had agreed to “at least stop by” the juke after a revival service at his church. “I was at
some of the other (Hambone Festival) stuff earlier,” I continued, half-shouting, half-
He smiled calmly. “We [black residents] don’t be out there, man. That’s for the white
folks, (and for folks who) come in from out of town, (to) have something to do.”
In all, I saw about forty people on the street and sidewalks of the Blues Alley district
before entering T-Bone’s. Inside, there were thirty or forty more patrons, standing, sitting,
and dancing as the headliners played their set. With few exceptions—myself, the kitchen
staff, the waitress, and a bartender—they were all white. These demographics reflect a
social reality that was explained to me over and again by black residents of Clarksdale, and
that became increasingly evident during my own visits to virtually every blues-related
venue in town: black Clarksdalians are largely absent from local blues performance scenes.
They do not attend day-festivals such as the popular Juke Joint Weekend, except
occasionally to enjoy a funnel cake or to allow their children time to play festival games;
with the exception of a shrinking cadre of black blues musicians and enthusiasts, they do
not frequent Clarksdale’s dedicated circuit of juke joints; and, as illustrated in the above
scene from T-Bone’s and the Blues Alley, they rarely go to local blues shows.
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In this chapter, I explore how the (racial) place histories of Clarksdale and the
Mississippi Delta color both how black Clarksdalians characterize the blues and their
decisions about attending local scenes of blues performance. In particular, I juxtapose the
views that black residents have of the downtown square, especially the area that has come
to be known as the Blues Alley District (see Figure 2), with the town’s history of civic
development and change. I show that black Clarksdalians have come to imbue the
downtown square, Blues Alley, and their attendant businesses with pronounced racial
meaning. Indeed, not only do black Clarksdalians view the blues as an antiquated music
form and, as demonstrated in the previous chapter, a mnemonic stand-in for past
experience, but they also characterize it as a “racialized” (Omi and Winant 2015) social
space—“social” because they have developed a set of racial expectations about the people,
behaviors, and interactions associated with the blues, from harmonica playing to street
busking, and “space” because they view the buildings and venues that comprise
I arrive at Phedra’s house, a quant home in Oakhurst, just after Rick Sutton and his
“Good to see y’all again,” I wave to Rick and Victoria as they stand in the shadows of
their open car doors, holding to the last bits of laughter from the ride over.
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“Brian, what’s going on, man?” Rick extends his hand as I approach them. I had met
them a week earlier at Delta Brook. We had only spoken briefly then, but they both had
“Hey!” Phedra greets us from the perch of her doorway, smiling widely and
balancing her daughter Missy on her hip. She summons Victoria inside and instructs Rick
“So, what all have you been doing since you been in Clarksdale,” Rick picks up where
our short conversation at Delta Brook had left off—with a flurry of questions about what
had brought me to his hometown. I explain my daily routine of writing sessions in the
place the sodas on Phedra’s countertop and take a seat on two barstools near the kitchen
table. “I’m at Delta Brook a lot, mostly because that’s where I’ve been meeting the most
people.”
“Well, I’ll tell you, that’s your first problem right there.” Rick casually thumbs
through a magazine from a stack in front of him. “Most of (the) folks…around in that little
corner of town, they don’t know what they [they’re] talking about, not if you want’to know
the real story. All they know is blues. Let me change that,” he stops himself. “They think
Indeed, I had spent many mornings at Delta Brook, as well as other establishments
After a while, I had grown familiar with how the racial composition of the restaurant’s
clientele changed throughout the day. In the mornings, the oversized booth tables filled
with older white residents. There was a group of about six white men, all with silver hair of
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varying darkness and weight, who sat at a large farm table in the center of the restaurant.
There was John and Porter, two older white men, who had a routine of leaving half-filled
coffee cups to talk and smoke cigarettes outside, before returning to finish them. There
were pairs and trios of older white women who laughed and talked while idly thumbing
through magazines, and larger groups who met for mahjong tournaments. The lunchtime
rush was more diverse. Mixed crowds of employees for the school district huddled together
over laughter and oversized cups of tea. Occasionally, an older black couple would venture
observations. “It seems like that’s just a different part of Clarksdale over there. You know
“Let me stop you there. I’m glad you got it! If you see the model of (the downtown
square)—it’s just a circle. Delta Brook, Yazoo Pass, Moonies, Ground Zero,” he shuffles
through the names of some of the businesses on the square. “Most of that was done maybe
in the last 10 or 12 years. The Blues Museum, that was done probably 15 years ago.”
Phedra, who has been methodically checking and rechecking the oven while
laughing with Victoria, excuses herself to an adjacent room to check on Missy and “freshen
up.”
“I was talking to a black woman,” Rick continues. “She had a hand in it [Clarksdale’s
downtown revitalization campaign]. They ran her out, but she had a hand in it. See, she
understands it now. She talks about, all the time, what them folks doing over there.” Rick
straightens his posture and slants his lips, preparing to imitate the woman. “‘Them white
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folks no good! White folks this and that’…And, I’m sitting there like, I been tried to tell you
all this!”
Victoria laughs. “Rick.” She calls to him seriously. They share a knowing glance.
On cue, Rick shifts to a concluding tone. “I will say this, then we can talk about
something else. There’s a group that meets over there [downtown], and they make sure no
Rick’s comments about the Blues Alley District implicitly substantiate Twon’s claim
that Clarksdale’s blues festivals are racially exclusive. More directly, though, he is framing
the downtown square as a racially exclusive place, a separate place in Clarksdale primarily
patronized by white residents. Rick refers to the square as a “circle,” an allusion to its racial
dynamics and to the limited range of dining and entertainment options. Some residents
repeated his metaphor. Others opted for their own. Marshay Townes, a 34-year-old native
resident, calls the square the “special club.” Shirley Morris, also a native resident, more
aptly calls it “where a lot of your white folks go for their lunch dates, and meetings.”
Rick’s comments are also directed towards the enduring specter of racial separatism
in Clarksdale. Citing inside knowledge gleaned from relationships with stakeholders who
had been involved with the blues revitalization campaign, Rick claims that there have been
concerted, if insidious, efforts to limit the number of black businesses in and near the Blues
Alley. Rick’s claim is as much an indictment of the ongoing agenda to revitalize the
segregation.
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“Downtown was white.”
and political life, for residents of both Clarksdale and many of the adjacent rural townships
cluster of social and civic institutions spread over 15 square city blocks. There was the
county jail and courthouse, a civic auditorium, the historic Alcazar Hotel and Paramount
Theatre, the Illinois Central Passenger (Train) Depot, and a variety of specialty shops,
agricultural warehouses, and departments stores—in a fifteen-block span just East of the
downtown square has long fulfilled another function: the establishment and maintenance
of Clarksdale’s racial order. Prior to the 1970’s, black residents of Clarksdale lived, almost
exclusively, south of the downtown square and railroad tracks: Black Downtown, the
Roundyard, and the Brickyard on the east side of the Sunflower River, and Riverton on the
west side (see Figure 2). White Clarksdalians lived north of the tracks and west of the
square in the sprawling Oakhurst community, and in a two-block stretch of homes just
“Downtown was white, and Oakhurst was white.” Auntie remembers. I have been
sitting with her for about an hour now, time enough for her to reflect on her childhood in
the nearby town of Lurand, take two phone calls, waive away a visit from her niece, and
finish one and a half cans of soda. In between spirited scripture-quoting devotions and loud
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from, Auntie explains how race defined social life in the areas on and near the downtown
square. “When I tell you they didn’t even allow black cars on the streets over there! (They)
didn’t wan’a even see no black cat on the ground! They was just that prejudiced!” She claps
“So, where did you go? Where did black folks go? I ask through laughter.
“Well, right over here on our side of the tracks was Krogers, around the corner was
Mac’s [convenience store], and right around there was You-Save shoe store. And, just like
you couldn’t catch us [black residents] over there, you couldn’t catch them [white
residents] over here.” Auntie takes a final drink of her soda and tucks the empty can into
her lap. “Now, we had more businesses over this way, you know, in the black area.”
The “black area” that Auntie references was once referred to as “The New World
District.” Throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s, it comprised a short stretch of mostly black-
owned businesses along Fourth Street (now Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard) just south of
the railroad tracks. It included the Fourth Street Drug Store, owned by native resident and
NAACP state president Aaron Henry, as well as a lively stretch of shops, clubs, and the New
Roxy Blues Club and Theater. The “New World” moniker had come into usage as a way to
distinguish social events intended for black residents and those intended for white ones.
Black residents went to blues shows and stage plays at the New Roxy. White residents went
to the Paramount theater on the square. Black residents shopped along Fourth Street and
Issaqeuna Avenue. White residents perused the department stores on Yazoo Avenue.
Today, with the exception of a laundromat and dry cleaners, a flower shop, and small auto
parts store, the area is mostly shuttered, and black residents now refer to the area with
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some variation of “Downtown,” “Black Downtown,” or the “real downtown,” a title they also
associate with a small residential neighborhood that begins one block farther South.
“We [black residents] just did our own stuff, Janice continues. “It was like, we was in
our own little world. Just our own stuff,” she pauses, “which wasn’t too much now, hear!
And, my family, we lived—I wouldn’t say a rough life—but we was in poverty. But, we lived
comfortable. Daddy made sho’ [sure] we was satisfied, you know. We had gardens and
hogs—we ain’t have no cows—chickens, and things like that. So, we really wasn’t bothered
‘bout going to the white man for nothing. We had our own.”
Where black residents did breach the proverbial line in the sand, whether
attempting to rent or buy a home in the wrong neighborhood or venturing on the wrong
side of the tracks after dark, they faced aggressive backlash. Hamp, a 31-year-old
Clarksdale native, explained the system of social checks and balances. “You (would) go to
jail for being over there in Oakhurst! My daddy got locked up for walking across the
bridge—the First Street Bridge right damn over there—to Oakhurst because no blacks was
allowed over there after a certain hour. (They) made a law called the ‘dog law’: no niggas to
be seen after 12 midnight over there. Period.” Hamp had shared the anecdote with little
ado, barely pausing from his crowded lunch plate, not bothering to lower his tone when
saying “nigga,” as was common practice among other respondents, especially when in
Hamp’s accounting of the dog law was repeated by several other residents and has
Clarksdale. In one such interview, the late Frank Ratcliff, the long-time curator of the
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had a 12 o’clock curfew during that time [1940’s and 1950’s]. This town here, at 12 o’clock,
baby, you had to be off the streets. If you didn’t have a job, you’d go to jail…if you were
Black businesses were not excluded from such pronounced, often violent, policies
related to the social contract established by the railroad tracks and reinforced by
stakeholders on the downtown square. On May 4, 1963, white locals bombed Aaron
Henry’s Fourth Street Drug Store (Hamlin 2012; Henry 2000). Although the drug store was
technically located in the “New World” district, its proximity to the downtown square—it
was located just two blocks from Delta and Yazoo Avenues, the two busiest downtown
streets—and its function as a meeting space for Civil Rights organizing activity, had
unsettled the local white establishment. Henry referenced the enduring grip of segregation
on the downtown square in a later reflection on Clarksdale’s turbulent 1960’s. “If I ever
change the mind that I have now from the position of non-violence…you ain’t going to find
me burning down Fourth Street and Issaquena out here. I’m going downtown on Delta and
“I don’t know if you know about Aaron Henry’s drug store, but Aaron Henry was a
black man. He was the only black somebody to have a business anywhere on that
downtown square,” Essie Dee had explained to me as we talked on her front porch.
“I think I’ve read about that. Wasn’t it a fire or a bomb or something,” I ask.
“From what I know, they threw some bottles through the window, through the door,
30Gabriels, Leo. “In Memoriam: Frank “Rat” Ratcliff (Riverside, Hotel). Blues Magazine.
https://www.bluesmagazine.nl/in-memoriam-frank-rat-ratcliff-riverside-hotel-clarksdale/
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The downtown square now encompasses some 60 business and civic institutions,
and, as chronicled in chapter one, a large share of these businesses are related to the blues,
most notably the Blues Alley District, which includes T-Bones, Moonies, and Ground Zero,
as well as the Delta Blues Museum and an outside stage area for festivals and concerts.
In 2013, Roshanda Jones opened Melin, an all-in-one hair salon, barbershop, spa,
and gift boutique, becoming the fourth black-owned business on the square and the only
such business on Yazoo Avenue. Over the course of several conversations with her
boyfriend, Zeek, a barber at the salon, I learn that Melin’s “prime location” had caused some
discomfort among local business owners. “People didn’t want her opening (the shop), they
didn’t want her over here, and they was go’n’ do whatever it took to keep her out—buy her
out, run her out, whatever. You know what I’m saying?” I am reclined in a cushioned chair,
holding as still as possible as Zeek gently presses a straight razor to my forehead. “Mostly
what you got over here is that whites own everything.” Zeek lifts the razor from my head
and waves it through the air, pointing to various corners of the shop. “Over here, over on
the next street [Delta Avenue], and all over here [the Blues Alley]. And, when we come
When ‘Twon frames the Hambone Festival as a social and geographic space that is
“for the white folks,” and when Rick alludes to the alleged efforts of local business owners
to limit the number of businesses like Melin on the downtown square, they are doing so
against the backdrop of Clarksdale’s extended history of residential and social segregation.
In some cases, as with Auntie, respondents could easily recall first-hand memories of such
dynamics in segregated Clarksdale. In other cases, as with Hamp, they recounted second-
and third-hand stories about how Clarksdale’s racial order was reified and maintained.
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And, while a few black businesses have made inroads on the downtown space, those efforts
have not gone without pushback. In the wake of these shared experiences and memories,
many black residents alluded to an enduring sense of discomfort when patronizing the
Big Danny, Kathereen, and I are still at Delta Brook. Big Danny drops a wrinkled
napkin over his plate and slides his half-empty glass of watery sweet tea across the table to
Kathereen. “Wonder do they bring you refills,” he asks her with a knowing grin.
“Psssh,” she dismisses his question, rolling her eyes as she walks toward a towering,
silver drink dispenser labeled “Sweet” in wide, cursive writing. She returns with a full glass
At my request, Big Danny explains his day-to-day routine as a truck driver. “I’m out
there on the road most of the day. I like to listen to my music, maybe to some talk politics.”
Then, as if the conversation has grown too serious for his liking, he jokes, “And, you know I
do my hustling a little bit here and there.” He nudges me in the side and winks heavily. “See,
Kathereen got a good paying government job, and my ass just been chasing money all over
“In 1975!” I finish his sentence, recalling an earlier comment about his time at the
University of Mississippi.
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Kathereen’s smile softens, eventually giving way to a stern glare directed as much at
me as some imagined congregation. “I was just following the plan that the Lord had laid out
for me.”
As our conversation continues, Big Danny’s attention trails off. His eyes move slowly
along the growing line of patrons standing in line. “See, all this here is new.” He studies the
conversation of two gray-haired white men—John and Porter—standing near us, directly
in front of the exit. He looks up, unimpressed by the soft, orange glow of a globe light that
“Me and my (friend) came in here some time ago, back when they first opened.”
“I’m just glad our friend let us sit in his neighborhood,” Danny looks to Kathereen
with a grin. “You must be a high class black person,” he returns his attention to me. “They
let you just sit in over here. You know how they do sometimes.” His tone moves from
sarcasm to whisper. “Y’know it’s some neighborhoods around (that) they kind’of don’t
want us in.”
leans forward, her voice again registering in a sermonic meter. “One thing I’ll tell you about
black folks,” she tilts her head forward, peering at me through the narrow frames of her
glasses. “We smart.” She mouths more words to me as John and Porter carry their
conversation outside, their frail figures soon replaced by a wave of hot air. “Black folk know
how to make do,” she returns to her normal speaking voice. “(We) can do what they do
with our eyes closed,” she nods at the men, now standing just outside the door.
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Big Danny begins a thought—“I can tell you when all this, here, started”—before his
attention trails off again, this time captured by the strut of a slender white woman passing
by. “This place, here,” he continues, “all these (blues) festivals,” he pauses for effect. “When
they figured out it was some money in it!” He belts a loud laugh, before, again, surveying
our surroundings: the idling chatter of the late-lunch crowd; the heavy limp of Mr. Cee, one
of the restaurant’s workers; the condensation pooling at the bottom of his glass of tea,
again watered down and nearly empty. Then, as if reaching the end of a laborious calculus
equation, he concludes, “You just don’t see us [black Clarksdalians],” He sighs, “in places
like this that much, (or at) the festivals and things like that.”
Black residents referenced more than abstract feelings of discomfort and the
general dearth of black businesses when explaining their views of the downtown square
and Blues Alley. They also recounted antagonistic experiences when attending business
Two days after the meeting at Phedra’s house, I take Rick up on an offer to stop by
his downtown office to carry on our conversation. “So, would you say (downtown) is
mostly the same or kind of different from other places around here, in Clarksdale?”
Rick is more reserved today, careful to take as much time as he needed to respond
to each of my questions. “You can get all this now,” he insists more than once, each time
nodding at my voice recorder. “I can give you a couple (of) experiences.” He wedges his
chin in the crease of his fingers. “I had a lady come down here—a friend—and we was at
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Moonies. (It was) me, her, my wife, and some mo’ folks, and we was go’n’ try to patronize
Moonies. But, the waitress [a white woman],” he pauses mid-sentence. “I have to say this. I
tip. I tip well. But, (the waitress) act like she,” he pauses again. “I just need the same respect
as an individual in there as the whites get. My wife… kept telling me, ‘We ain’t going back in
there no mo.’”
Moonies, which opened in the Blues Alley District in the early 2000’s, is one of the
most popular blues clubs in town, offering a full lunch and dinner menu, a cluster of pool
tables, and live entertainment three nights a week. It is owned by two wealthy white
residents, both natives of Clarksdale. Much of the space is outfitted to look old and well-
used. The chairs are wobbly and chipped. The tablecloths are dingy. The day-to-day
operations are run by an older white woman, who also periodically works as a waitress and
bartender. The rest of the staff at Moonies is also predominantly white, save a few of the
“We got poor treatment, nasty talking, just rude, you know, but what made it good
for us is that we can laugh and talk and interact well with (anybody), no matter what crowd
we in. Even that crowd,” he laughs. “We laugh and talk and carry on, so a lot of good people
come over, but as a whole, just bad, bad treatment. As a whole, just bad.”
Experiences with bad treatment were not limited to black patrons attending venues
or events in the Blues Alley District. Blues musicians, who often touted the redeeming
elements of local blues scenes, also suggested that race had factored into some of their own
interactions.
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“Probably, mostly white.”
Before spending the day with Biggs, chauffeuring him on a round of errands and
appointments, eventually sitting through his daily busking session outside of Cat Head’s, I
meet him at Moonies for a quick introduction. I begin by asking what first piqued his
“So, you got into blues early on. Did that come from something else? Did you start off
with blues, or something else…like rapping? I remember when I was younger, when I was
15 and 16, everybody I knew was trying to rap. Hell, I was trying to rap.” I laugh.
“Man, my uncle used to tell me that I could be a rapper ‘cause I could rap! Like, I
“Oh, let me hear something!” I jokingly push the voice recorder to his side of the
table.
“Man, I said used to!” He laughs before continuing, “but, let’s say I write a blues song,
you can hear the rap in it. Say, like, uhm,” Biggs hunches over the table, taking a moment to
reposition the voice recorder before clearing his throat and sucking his teeth in a final
effort of exaggerated preparation. “Baby, I know he did you right,” he sings. “I can’t believe
you let him hit it tight. But, baby I need you to let me get it tonight.” Biggs hits the table
lightly with the knuckles of one hand and the palm of the other, creating a soft rhythm.
“Please don’t go. Yeah, I cheated. Please don’t go. Yeah, I been rude. Please don’t go. I
thought I was that dude. Now, you left me standing here, baby, you know that ain’t cool.” He
bursts into laughter. “Oh shit, I need that [recording], so I can write that song out!”
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Our laughter blends with the generic saxophone instrumental playing in the
background, the ebbing murmur of nearby conversation, and the faint clangs and dings
“What does the typical crowd look like for you, when you perform around here?” I
ask, recalling the dozens of experiences that I had had like the one at T-Bone’s. “Let’s say
you’re (here) at Moonies. When you play here, is the crowd mostly white, mostly black, or,
“And, how does that make you feel? Is that something that you think a lot about?”
“Naw, it’s really not. It never passes my mind. I don’t think about race and stuff like
that. It doesn’t matter the color of the crowd, long as they catch that feeling, long as they get
what the music got for ‘em, you know.” Biggs circles back to his definition of the blues, a
refrain that he has already repeated twice in our short conversation. “The blues is a feeling,
not a color. When you go outside, and it’s cold, and you got on shorts, that’s the blues.” He
raises his voice. “When your girlfriend tell you she love you and cheat on you behind yo’
back—”
“Right!” He laughs.
“And, so that’s how you approach performing,” I continue. “I got it. And, do you feel
like you are treated—because you are doing that kind of performance, putting yourself out
there like that—do you feel like you are treated differently because you are playing, like
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“Oh, yeah,” he answers with little hesitation, raising the pitch of his voice for added
emphasis. “Somebody called me ‘boy’ or something like that, you know, something that’s
not my name…Or, you hear stuff from, just, people that you see after the show or just here
and there…They’ll bring up somebody name that’s white, somebody Caucasian that, you
know, has been playing a long time, and they’ll say little racist things, comparing them to
me. Some people (do it) with sarcasm, some people say it straight forward and direct, you
know.”
“Like what?”
“Like, ‘boy,’ and they just say little stuff like, how (did) I learn how to play so good,
or, they say something about my age, and” he stops himself. “But, you got’to understand, I
been doing this a long time—I been doing this—so I know what I’m up against, you know.
The odds (are) against me, but that just makes you try harder and not slack, you know.
That’s why I’m glad what I do because I know the struggle, and I know what we have to go
through as a people, and what we have to deal with. You know if you a black man, and you
going to a all-white place like a Moonies, like a T-Bone’s, wherever, then you know, one
thing, you go’n’ have to work your behind off—times ten—because they go’n’ be on that
As I have discussed and demonstrated thus far, almost all of the black Clarksdalians
that I spoke with expressed an open disdain for the blues, both in general and with
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sentiments are, no doubt, a function of the assumptions and expectations that residents
hold regarding blues music itself—namely, that it is only played on guitars and harmonicas
by white bohemians and a smattering of older black men—findings from chapter two
suggest that they are also rooted in the memories that the blues connotes. In this chapter, I
demonstrate that these sensibilities are also shaped by the racial history of Clarksdale, the
Delta, and, by extension, the South as well as the racial experiences that black residents
have had in the areas on and near the downtown square. When explaining their dislike for
the blues and general absence from local blues scenes, black Clarksdalians often cited
feeling out of place and unwelcome at local blues venues and related events. On one hand,
they had come to view blues performance, and especially the type of blues performed in
school teacher, notes, “the blues is more so what the white folk do [emphasis mine].” White
women and men were the leading acts on Clarksdale’s blues circuit; white women and men
owned most of the local blues clubs and blues-related establishments; white women and
Residents had also developed a set of racial expectations for the spaces on and near
the Blues Alley District. They noted the overall and enduring dearth of black-owned
business establishments in the historic downtown area and routinely cited personal
experiences with “bad,” “nasty,” or, indeed, “definitely, definitely racist” downtown
experiences and the lack of black-owned downtown business venues within Clarksdale’s
history of racial segregation and violence. To this end, patronizing or participating in blues
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businesses, such as the Delta Brook Café, equated to a return “to the scene of the crime,”
whether of past acts of racist violence or the looming potential of racist treatment. In this
way, to borrow Catina’s language, residents thought of the blues not only as “more so what
white folk do” but also as an exclusive space for white folks to go.
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Chapter 4: “The blues just won’t keep us standing.”: See(k)ing the Regional Future
“The thing, what they’re doing with the blues is alright—I have no problem saying,
it’s got some potential—but what I always say, too, is that it can’t be too particular.” Vera
Ann waives away my attempt to pay and continues talking, her eyes now shadowing two
black men, both somewhere in their early twenties, as they stumble and laugh to the back
of the store. “It can’t be all this, ‘okay, we go’n do this over here, and this over here.”
cashier and manager at a locally-owned convenience store just off the downtown square.
She has come to expect my near-daily visits. “You come in here every day and get the same
thing,” she repeats her running joke, referencing my daily fix for cinnamon candy and
chewing gum. “One day, I’m’on buy you a whole box of these things.”
Vera has also come to expect my questions, often haphazard and impromptu.
Tonight, I had asked her about an ongoing construction project on the downtown square,
what many residents refer to as, plainly, the “Third Street Building Project.” My question
has prompted a broader discussion about the blues revitalization campaign that has played
out in Clarksdale, more or less, since 1978, expanding most rapidly in the last fifteen years.
“And, right now, that’s what we see,” Vera continues. “They got the new place up on
Issaquena,” she references the New Roxy Blues Club and Theater that was recently bought,
renovated, and reopened by a white woman who had moved to the area from Seattle. “(You
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got) that spot there on the corner…(Aaron) Henry’s old store,” a reference to the Holy Moly
Drug Store, now run as a restaurant and ice cream parlor by a woman and man who had
moved to Clarksdale from Austrailia. “But but Aggie [Clarksdale Agricultural High School]
“How y’all get this store over here by the police!” One of the men jokes loudly as he
approaches the register clutching an assortment of potato chips and snack cakes.
“This ain’t my store!” Vera responds sternly. “Besides, if you straight, if you ain’t
doing nothing wrong, you ain’t got nothing to worry about, am I right?”
“That’s why y’all ain’t got no business. This the police sto’ [store]!” The man laughs
to himself as he passes Vera a crumpled bill and, perhaps sensing her heavy glare, forces a
few exaggerated concluding chuckles. “You know I’m just talking! Ain’t nothing wrong with
having a lil’ fun.” The two men talk and joke with each other as they exit the store.
“Young folks these days, I tell ya’.” Vera rolls her eyes, shifting her attention back to
a half-crumpled piece of paper that she has been scribbling onto. “I’m not really a blues
person, it’s just not my thing,” she continues, “but the way I see it, you got the city putting
all this money into a festival or [the Third Street Building Project], how can you build up a
“We have the potential,” Vera is now typing onto a large printing calculator,
carefully tracing her notes, not breaking from conversation even for a moment. “Clarksdale
got the potential to grow, to give people work, you know. I know we can do that. But, it
gotta be, what they say, one for all, them…for us. We got’to be in it together... And, right now
that’s not what you see. It’s mo’ like every man for himself…The mayor serves his
(constituents). The commissioners focus on their districts, and who you think get left with
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the bag? These communities…over there in Riverton, in Brickyard, out there in Sassee
venues, and commemoration markers that emerged in Clarksdale between 1978 and
2014—including the reopening of the New Roxy Blues Club, the opening of the Holy Moly
Drug Store, and the initiative to renovate a building on Third Street—was not
happenstance. It was the work of state legislators, local elected officials, and public
stakeholders aiming to address the impacts of the region’s precipitating structural decline
international interest in the blues (Jones 2007; Wald 2004), these individuals, in part with
infrastructure for blues tourism in Clarksdale and throughout the Mississippi Delta (King
2011). They believed, and openly proclaimed, that blues tourism could be a catalyst for
economic recovery. While many public stakeholders and some residents welcomed and
celebrated the ensuing blues revival—recall Clarksdale Mayor Carl White’s comment about
blues tourism being “green and creative and very helpful”—as Vera Ann demonstrates in
the opening exchange, not everyone has come to view it so favorably, or at least
uncritically.
Vera Ann has lived in Clarksdale her entire life. She struggles to reconcile the
continued focus on blues tourism and development on the downtown square with the
persistence of economic and infrastructural decline in local black communities. She points
to the enduring possibility of the closure of Clarksdale Agricultural High School, which was
founded in 1924 as an agricultural high school for black residents of Clarksdale and rural
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Coahoma County—today the school serves about 300 black students from Clarksdale and
many of its northern border towns. Her critique of the revitalization campaign is motivated
by an abiding concern for and sense of solidarity with other black residents. She imagines
an opportunity structure in which black neighborhoods receive the same amount of public
attention and investments as the downtown square, in which residents have access to
meaningful work, in which black residents receive the resources and opportunities due to
them. Black residents were struggling, and, in her view, the officials and stakeholders
involved should consider a development approach more attentive to the concerns of black
residents.
In this chapter, I examine how black Clarksdalians view the town’s efforts to
downtown square. I focus particular attention on how residents view the short-term
impacts and long-term viability of these revitalization efforts and cast the motivations of
the key figures and organizations involved. Vera’s comments about the revival not being
“too particular,” and her view that Clarksdale “got the potential” if everyone is “in it
together” echoes a recurring sentiment among black Clarksdalians. They reject the local
blues revitalization campaign not only because of their cultural and aesthetic preferences
for other music forms, and not just because of past memories that they associate with the
blues, but also because local development projects associated with the blues have failed to
address their most pressing concerns about the town’s demographic and economic future.
I posit that these views are a function not just of black residents’ dislike for blues
music and entertainment—to be sure, Vera Ann had said several times that she is “not a
blues person”—but of a broader view that Clarksdale’s, and the Delta’s, blues revitalization
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agenda is a failing and misguided, or worse insidious and destructive, development agenda
(Woods 1998), that it was lending to “uneven development” (Ashman 2012; Smith 1984;
Squires and Kubrin 2005; Woods 1998)—broadly defined as, persistent differences in the
or regional bloc. Here, residents are positioning the blues, more than genre, memory, or
racialized social space, as a site of regional futurism, wherein they engage in debates, literal
and subversive, about the most effective approaches to regional development and change.
We are both uncomfortably full, having sampled nearly all of the fried and carb-
laden dishes from the buffet line. I settle back into my chair as he pushes a half-full plate to
the edge of the table. He is responding to a question about “how Clarksdale has changed
“I worked for this city for thirty-four years,” he announces with pride. “I worked
around here a long time. Almost got killed working’ for this city. Three times, I almost got
killed.”
“Almost got killed?” My response is almost reflexive. “How did that happen?” I laugh
nervously.
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“First time, I was over there in Riverton to pull a meter, a service meter. Get there,
get back there [behind the house], and the meter blew,” he cups his hands to his face. “Just
blew up. And, if I would’ve been any closer, that would’ve been it. Then, the second time, a
power line fell down and almost hit me over the shoulder,” he slaps a hand across his chest.
“Over a hundred thousand volts almost hit me on the shoulder…Third time, I’m up two
stories fixing a (power line), and one of the pins fell off, and when the pin fell, I fell…Messed
“How old were you then? Or, I guess, when did all of that happen?”
His eyes freeze on a spot just over my shoulder. “I was in my twenties. I believe I
was about 25 (or) 26.” At this point, Lee Eldra backtracks to explain that he first began
working in Clarksdale’s Public Works Department after he graduated high school. “I had a
family. I had to bring in money some kind’f way. I started out in [Public Works] when I was
eighteen (or) nineteen. I bounced around some, but I came back (in my twenties).”
“So, would you say Clarksdale has changed a lot or little since then,” I remind him of
“Oh boy! It just done went down. If you living in Clarksdale now, you done went
down. These folks don’t wan’a be here, man,” his voice has grown tight and sullen. “If you
live here, you don’t wan’a be here. Ain’t nothing here! Schools down, test scores down,
people can’t find no work, gang banging, high crime…all hell just done broke loose…I’m
doing alright, I’m doing good, see, compared to some folks. I’m doing good compared to
some folks. Some folks struggling, doing bad. It’s bad ‘round here, man.”
Lee Eldra has cycled through a dozen stories from his younger days in Clarksdale
since we arrived at the restaurant. Some have drawn him to silence, others to anger—
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rarely to laughter—but he has never been more animated than now, repeating the same
observation like a chorus. “It’s bad ‘round here! If you livin’ here, you don’t wan’a be here. I
ain’t go’n tell you nothing wrong. It ain’t nothing here for you. It’s just a big circle. It’s just a
big ol’ circle. Nothing new! They turned this to a blues city!”
“They turned this to a blues city,” I repeat him, my voice a dry whisper compared to
his.
mere idea that something might challenge his claim. “They done took over the blues. They
done took over the blues! They making money that way. That’s what they did to a lot of the
stores downtown! (The blues) was invented by a black man! It was invented by a black
man, but the white man took over! They making money off it!” He pauses briefly before
repeating, “They turned this to a blues city. Look downtown. A blues city! You can always
“Naw! No! Man, naw! You don’t need that!” Lee Eldra allows no room for ambiguity
or second-guessing. “If you come here, that’s all you hear about Clarksdale is the blues.
That’s it. Blues city. B.B. King. Blues city. Robert Johnson. Blues city.”
Lee Eldra looks back on his tenure with the city government with both pride and
bewilderment. On one hand, he is proud of his own resilience, his willingness to withstand
and overcome challenging circumstances, his commitment to “being a good father to (his)
son,” and his capacity to be “damn good” at his job. On the other hand, he is bewildered,
disheartened by the degree to which Clarksdale’s public infrastructure and social fabric
have apparently declined, or “went down,” since his earliest years working for the Public
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Works Department. He bemoans the town’s declining school ratings—a “D” on the state’s
A-F accountability scale—and increased rates of violent crime, and he observes that
Lee Eldra grows most insolent at his first mention of the blues revitalization
campaign—“They turned this to a blues city!” In his view, the proliferation of blues
had not come about organically and was not a product of the demands of local residents.
Rather, it was the work of an exclusive group of public stakeholders, whom he references
variably as “they” and “the white man.” These individuals actively sought to establish
Clarksdale’s tourism infrastructure in the service of their own social, political, and, most
evident to Lee Eldra, economic interests. In other interviews and interactions, Lee Eldra
refers to specific individuals in this selective group by name or a subtle nudge or gesture in
related businesses, events, and venues in Clarksdale, citing the downtown square as the
clearest piece of evidence that there is an ongoing campaign to “turn (Clarksdale) to a blues
city.” His claim that Clarksdale is “just a big ol’ circle” can be read in two ways. On one hand,
it is a cry of frustration and a call for a new revitalization campaign centered on other
aspects of Clarksdale’s place history and culture. Whatever that campaign would look like,
he was sure, and insistent, that it need not involve the blues. On the other hand, his
comment can be read as a broader critique of Clarksdale’s opportunity structure. While the
means of exploitation had certainly changed, the structure had remained the same—“it was
invented by a black man, but the white man took over…(and is) making money off it.” This
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latter interpretation, linking the emergent blues tourism infrastructure with previous
systems of racial exploitation and inequality, was repeated by many of the other black
residents that I spoke with, including Antione “Twon” Smith, a 27-year-old native of
Clarksdale.
A heavy downpour pelts Delta Avenue—a light steam rises and then disappears into
the air. “You might as well go’n and get comfortable, buddy. You ain’t going nowhere for a
while.” Twon jokes as I swipe my phone for the day’s remaining weather forecast. We have
been at Stone Pony, a white-owned pizza shop on the downtown square, for much of the
evening, laughing loudly and dodging glances of both amusement and discomfort from
Our conversation has been wide-ranging, from the joys of his childhood trips to St.
Louis to visit his father and older brother to the stresses of growing up in Willow Park,
what he describes as “probably the worst, poorest apartments in Clarksdale.” We have now
settled on a serious tone. He alternates between explaining the structure and machinations
of the city government—“at the top, you got the mayor and the board of commissioners”—
to critiquing its role in maintaining inequality. “The infrastructure here is always go’n’ be
the same. It’s like a bus route. The people in the positions change—don’t matter we got this
mayor or that mayor, this commissioner or that one—and that’s just sometimes (that) they
really just change.” He laughs, a move that I quickly learn is more a nervous tick than a
direct response to anything that comes up in conversation. “The bus might change. Ground
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Zero (blues club) used to be a cotton house [warehouse]! Stovall Plantation where Muddy
Waters’ cabin at, you see the name Stovall Plantation. And, downtown, all up and down
Delta Avenue,” he gestures toward the pouring rain and steaming streets. “Well, first of all,
historically speaking, before the Civil Rights Movement, blacks weren’t even allowed
downtown.”
“I’m telling you! Same stops, same times. Nigga, same path, and the same road! It’s
never go’n change. Might go faster, might go slower, but never go’n change, you feel me.”
“Shit, you get on, or you walk,” we both laugh, and he continues, “and if you end up
walking, it’s go’n’ be hard for you. You (will) have to go against underfunded
of folks (are) struggling right now, bruh. Take me; I went and got a degree, got three
degrees. I got three damn degrees, and I’m struggling?” He laughs at the absurdity of his
own question.
“I have friends who have their Master’s (and are) unemployed, can’t get a job. I have
friends who have a specialist, working a secretary job. How in the hell? How in the hell you
got a degree and still got’to struggle…The infrastructure that exist here—”
“That bus route that exist here allow it to happen. That’s why I say, get on or walk.”
Twon earned his Associate’s Degree from a local community college and completed
Bachelor’s and Master’s programs at two state universities, one 70 miles south of
Clarksdale and the other in Jackson, the state capital. He returned to Clarksdale hoping that
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the time and financial sacrifices that he had made along the way—nine years, two school
transfers, and multiple student loans—would pay off. “I thought (staying in school) would
let me live comfortable, you know, (or) at least give me a chance (to),” he had explained.
However, after nearly a year working an “underqualified” job and a “horrible experience” in
which he moved to a nearby city for a job that was awarded to someone else “at the last
minute,” he took a temporary position in the Admissions Office at the same community
college where he had earned his Associate’s. “And, just like that, I was back living with my
moms.”
During our conversation at Stone Pony, and in dozens of other interactions during
my time in Clarksdale, Twon expressed a heavy sense of frustration with the dearth of
desirable employment opportunities in Clarksdale, even for residents, like him, with above-
average levels of training and educational attainment. “I love my job,” he assured me one
evening while we watched the NCAA Men’s Basketball Semifinals with friends and
cocktails. “But, when you come from where I did in the projects, where folks barely got a
pot to piss in, you got’a work for every dollar and every cent. You starting from zero! And
from what I been through, from what I came from, I want more…The only way for me to get
where I wan’a be, the only way for me to improve my life is to leave! The only way to
opportunity structure did not offer residents any meaningful chance for upward mobility.
Further, in his view, and in the view of many other black residents, the dearth of
employment opportunities often made it difficult to navigate even the most basic daily
needs. “Take somebody who work at Church’s Chicken [a fast food restaurant]. Clarksdale
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got one Church’s, and you got some people been employed there for fifteen, maybe twenty,
years. That old chicken that they got when they close, they gotta take home to feed some
people that’s living in the house—that’s momma, auntie, kids, and probably a cousin or
somebody else that’s just living there. Then, that money she making—what’s that $7.25 for
forty hours, if she able to get forty hours—got’a pay every bill in the house. And, paying
every bill in the house, she might not have no transportation, and she don’t have nothing.
chances for upward mobility, the inability of many black residents to secure the necessities
of daily life, and his own difficulties finding employment—is a more focused critique of
Clarksdale’s blues tourism practices. In particular, Twon views the blues revitalization
campaign as a continuation of the social, political, and economic status quo in Clarksdale.
When he quips that “Ground Zero used to be a cotton warehouse,” he is not only describing
square to one of the most popular and well known blues club in the country 31, but he is also
drawing a direct line from the blues, the chief fixture of Clarksdale’s current revitalization
campaign, to cotton, Clarksdale’s chief export through much of the 18 th and 19th centuries.
When he emphasizes that Muddy Waters, perhaps Clarksdale’s most popular blues
musician, was born on a plantation, Twon is situating the blues within a broader system of
social and economic exploitation. Indeed, by linking the blues revitalization campaign with
earlier economic systems such as slavery and sharecropping, he is claiming that the blues,
while possibly garnering economic returns, is exploiting and shirking Clarksdale’s black
31 Liddell, Larry. 2016. Ground Zero, Red’s Lounge ranked top 2 blues clubs in U.S.” Clarksdale Press Register.
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communities in the process. This notion that Clarksdale’s blues revival was only beneficial
to select racial groups and communities in Clarksdale was echoed by most every black
A few days before meeting with Doris King in the quiet of her office at Royal Funeral
Home, I met with her son Hamp amidst the mid-morning bustle of a fast food restaurant on
State Street. I had come to frequent the restaurant on weekday mornings, entertained by a
group of elderly black men, all between 54 and 70, who had made it their morning stop for
breakfast and all manner of conversation, from money and women to sports and politics. In
most other ways, the restaurant is typical. Around lunchtime, the drive-thru line wraps
around the building. In the evenings, young people gather around phones and tablets with
laughter. The crowds are mostly racially mixed. But, in the morning—every morning and
always for the same two- or three-hour block—the group of black men meet and fill the
Hamp and I are sitting near a side door, both holding to small cups of steaming
coffee. “Here come another one,” Hamp gestures towards a charter bus that has just pulled
For a moment, the restaurant goes quiet. The cashiers stop laughing and calling
demands to the cooks on the line, customers stand near the condiment station grasping
handfuls of napkins and ketchup, the two tables of regulars pause an apparent argument
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over who is the most skillful [auto] mechanic, and everyone looks to the growing tour
“We got a bus,” the lone voice of a black woman calls from behind the register, at
once setting the morning back in motion. People go on placing their order, and the table of
regulars picks up where their argument had left off. “You a cantankerous ol’ bastard this
morning, ain’t you!” Chief, the loudest and most active member of the group calls to
another.
“How often do they come through here,” I ask Hamp, pointing to the bus, noting that
I had seen more charter buses and tourist groups since the schools had dismissed for
summer.
“Shit, now it seem like every week, or every other week…but it just depends on the
time of year. Around this time”—it is early May—“and then when the festivals start up.” We
both continue to look towards the bus, now a crowd of about twenty people, mostly white
“They got all this sweet in this coffee, taste like Kool-Aid.” Hamp holds his cup away
from the table at a slight angle, frowning skeptically. “Yeah, I might have to get them to
remake this.”
has led multiple campaigns for public office—he is openly critical of Clarksdale’s blues
revitalization campaign. “Clarksdale is just a mechanism for the same things that’s been
happening in the Delta since plantation times,” he explains. “It’s the same thing over and
over. We’re big on…the blues. Cooking, soul food, (and) blues. You got B.B. King in
Indianola (Mississippi). Here, you have Muddy Waters…And, people come here for that,”
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his observation is validated by the stirring noise of the tour group who have filled every
“I see. A lot of people (come here), right? Is that a good thing?” I ask, scanning the
lively group.
“The blues is a good thing for Clarksdale, but right now we’re not seeing the
benefits. Like, where is that money going? Is it just going downtown?” He stops to drink
from his newly-filled cup of coffee. “Is it going to [Mayor White’s] pocket? Is it going to the
Chamber of Commerce? People who stay over there by where my momma stay [Black
Downtown], by Higgin’s [Middle School], and all these black communities…ain’t seeing it.
(Clarksdale) is getting millions of dollars from (blues tourism). How is the blues helping
Clarksdale? I don’t see it. What about us? What about the kids? What about the people who
“So, who is the “they” that you keep talk’nbout, and what do you think they should
be doing differently? You know what I’m saying? Where do they keep going wrong?”
“They, being them select few, the ones behind the scenes pulling the strings...Like
Mayor White, Bucky Pippen, Dusty Mitchell,” he runs through an extended list of white
public officials. “I understand they feel like the downtown is what brings the money.
Clarksdale is a small town. You do want a strong downtown. They say you’re only as strong
as your center, but at the same time, what about the rest of Clarksdale? We all needing help
around here.”
Hamp echoes and extends sentiments expressed by many of the other black
residents that I spoke with. Like Vera Ann and Lee Eldra, he looks upon the growing
prevalence of blues tourism in Clarksdale with both reticence and disdain. He is visibly
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agitated by the blues tour that has joined the morning rush at the restaurant, exaggeratedly
suggesting that such tours seem to come “every week now.” Further, like Twon, Hamp
implies that the local blues tourism infrastructure represents a continuation of the social,
political, and economic status quo both in Clarksdale and in the Delta writ large.
Hamp also joins other black residents in identifying and naming the individuals that
he deemed most responsible for the growing prevalence of blues tourism. While Lee Eldra
had relied on more general designations, Hamp identifies these individuals by name. In his
view, this group of powerbrokers, that consisted primarily of white elected officials and
business owners, was most responsible for “pulling the strings” of the revitalization
campaign; and, what is more, pulling them in a way that is most economically beneficial to
Hamp briefly departs from other black residents by acknowledging that Clarksdale’s
blues revitalization campaign had some redeeming elements. It was, in fact, a “good thing.”
However, he immediately calls that assessment into question, citing that it does not focus
on all areas of Clarksdale equally. In particular, he calls into question, the insisted focus on
the downtown square, a peculiarity observed by virtually all of the black residents that I
spoke with, including Bernard Edwards, one of the first residents to bring up the blues
“It’s the same reason why they only clean up certain parts of town.”
At 33, Bernard Edwards, a native resident, is one of the youngest appointed officials
in Clarksdale. We are standing outside of a restaurant on the downtown square, having just
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finished an early dinner and lengthy interview. “You might think this sounds crazy, but a lot
of Clarksdale’s issues are cosmetic,” Bernard talks in a steady tone, and points to a row of
boarded storefronts that extend past an empty intersection, eventually opening to the Delta
“I knew you were about to ask that,” he laughs. “Cosmetic, like, it’s the way people
perceive us, the image, all of that. If you look up and down Madison Avenue,” he references
the main street that passes from Oakhurst through the all-black Riverton neighborhood,
just across the river from the downtown square. “I’m just getting out of a meeting about
Project Madison [a town beautification initiative], and someone felt that we shouldn’t even
be involved over there [on Madison Ave.]. They felt like the people on that street weren’t
worth the time, those places don’t matter in the bigger picture.”
“Right. And, I got pissed because these are the main people who need to be behind
these things, and they don’t care.” Bernard smiles and waives to a group of white women
“And, why do you think the reception has been like that, among those folks, the ones
“They just feel like it’s not worth it. It’s the same reason why they only clean up
small step towards me. “White interests, you know. These are areas that get all the focus.
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Watch what areas they clean up when the festivals come up. Just watch. But, when it comes
to the black neighborhoods, it’s no attention. You know, the only time I’ve seen leaders go
“So, you talk about this frustration, and I can hear it in your voice now…but you’re
still here, you know what I mean. You’re still here doing this work. Why? What is it about
“Potential,” he answers quickly. “When I look at the negatives of a place, when I look
at the negatives of this town, of my family, and just in general, I also look at the potential.”
“Clarksdale has that hope, you know. When I look at that right there,” he points to a
boarded storefront directly across the street. “I see potential. When I look at that,” he
points to another boarded storefront, “I see potential. We’re sitting on a gold mine, but
“And, how do you see that potential manifesting? Like, how do you see yourself, or
“Our main focus has been blues, but no one is looking at the agricultural aspect, and
the Civil Rights aspect. That’s a whole ‘nother you know, market that’s untapped.”
needed revenue.” Yet, despite his measured support, he did not look upon the town’s
revitalization efforts completely uncritically. First, like many other black residents, he
noted that local elected officials and organizations focused too much on the downtown
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infrastructural improvement. As evidence, he cited the difficulties that he had encountered
while trying to garner support for Project Madison, a town beautification initiative that was
to focus on cleaning trash and debris alongside a portion of Madison Avenue that passed
through Riverton, a neighborhood with the highest rates of poverty in Clarksdale (see
Table 8). In Bernard’s view, that lack of support was emblematic of a broader belief that
those communities were not as valuable, not as important in Clarksdale’s “bigger picture,”
Bernard concludes our conversation with the suggestion that the revitalization
campaign was focused too much on blues tourism. He suggested that Clarksdale’s place
history and economic potential, in fact, extended beyond this blues. This claim emerged in
conversations with virtually every black resident that I spoke with. In some cases, as with
Bernard, it was mentioned with an air of hopefulness, a way to supplement something that
had already brought benefits to Clarksdale. In other cases, as with Shelton Nichols, a 27-
year-old long-term resident and founder of a local community development firm, its
mention came couched in an aggressive critique of how and why the blues had come to
to meet for an early dinner before rushing across town for a meeting. The small dining area
is empty. Shelton and I huddle over a table near the front, taking time to talk with Ms.
Angie, our waitress, each time she visits the table. I had come to know Ms. Angie well,
talking with her and the other members of the restaurant staff, all black women, whenever
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“I always get that question, ‘what does this place need the most,’” Shelton’s words
fade as his attention is drawn to a string of notifications on his phone. He taps and swipes
at the screen hurriedly before apologizing, switching the power off, and dropping the
phone into his bag. “What does this place need the most,” he repeats the question as he
returns his focus to our conversation. “Well, part of the problem is that we’ve been looking
for the answer to that question in the wrong places. We already have what we need the
most…” His demeanor grows serious. “We’ve been looking over our biggest asset. Like,
people don’t really talk about, like, the Civil Rights history here. They (are) all about just
blues, blues, blues, blues, blues.” He sighs and continues. “Which, like, people created the
blues, it was born here because people had the damn blues.” He laughs to himself and
continues, but, again, his words fade, this time as my attention freezes on his comment,
“So, wait. Do people here still have the damn blues?” I ask.
“He takes a quick breath, preparing to answer, but withdraws and sinks into his
seat; then again, except this time with a widening smile and shallow laugh. “Yeah. It just
depends on who you talk to. Like, depending on who you talk to, yeah. Some people say,” he
presses his lips tightly together and talks in an exaggerated baritone voice. “‘Oh, it’s a great
place, it’s a beautiful place, and everything is fine here.’ But, just think how segregated it is
here, and you can imagine who…is saying what. You can just drive through the
communities and see it. Like, wow, I wonder why it is that all the, uh, people,” he points to
the backside of his hand, “are staying there and there, and other people are staying there
and there. It’s racial. It’s economic. (It’s) class. All that.”
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Like many black residents of Clarksdale and other Delta towns, Shelton was born in
the Midwest—in his case, Chicago—and moved to Clarksdale as an adolescent. “It was to
get out of all that was going on up there [in Chicago]. My mom wanted a better life for me,
and then she got ill when I was young,” he explained. “So, she brought us here, to get back
close to some of my family—my great grandfather, my grandparents are from here. And,
it’s funny, it was kind’f like I was coming back home. I had never been here, but it was like
Shelton has spent the last several years working on dozens of community
development projects in Clarksdale and across the greater Mississippi Delta region. He
maintains that the biggest question facing Clarksdale in the coming years is not about
“finding something that is missing,” but rather capitalizing on what it already has—its
people.
“(Clarksdale is) not just the blues, right? Let’s highlight the people who led those
movements, that started those efforts, those visionaries,” he presses his hands together and
lowers them to the tabletop, adding a steady rhythm to his response, “ those innovators,
those creators, those disruptors…(Those) people made the blues, created the art, built the
infrastructure.” His voice takes on the rasp of a Baptist preacher. “The Civil Rights history
came from the people. It came from those struggles…and, you know what…it starts with the
people. It starts with the people that saw something in the Delta, that saw something in this
place. It started with visionaries like Aaron Henry, to step up and go into unchartered
waters, to take the path least traveled. It started with the people that created the blues, that
shared the blues with the world. It started with the people, and we’re overlooking this
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Like Bernard, Shelton suggested that Clarksdale had more than the blues to be
proud of, that the town’s Civil Rights history should hold a place in the town’s revitalization
impassioned plea. The Civil Rights movement was not merely a series of historical events.
Rather, it embodied a spirit of resilience and creativity that was endemic to black culture
Pearl and I have been at Big Bowl, an Asian cuisine hole-in-the-wall restaurant just
off State Street, for much of the evening. Several patrons, all black, have come and gone. The
owner has ventured from the kitchen more than once—“how is the food?” And, the deep
reds and pale yellows of the evening sky have turned black. As our conversation reaches a
lull, I shift to a concluding tone. “What’s your vision for this place, for Clarksdale?”
Pearl breathes deeply. “I just think we can do so much more. I want to open an art
shop. I want to do all kinds of stuff. I want to get some art in here. I want this to be like
Oxford [Mississippi]! People can come to hear and see art, antique stores, art stores, all
“So, you think of the blues as a good thing? You want those people (who are
interested in the blues) to keep coming, but you want to see some other things?”
“The blues is fine. We can keep doing the blues, creative economy, all that. But, right
now, that’s the only economy.” She laughs contemptuously. “Factories have closed. We’ve
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got a few, but nothing like used to be here…even when I first got here…So, we’ve got to
build, you know. She repeats herself—“to build”—pounding the table with her closed fist.
“We need more than the blues. We need art, more art galleries. We need more antique
shops. We need more food. Oh my goodness, downtown especially. (We need) different
types of food. I can’t go to a good Thai restaurant. You get tired of eating Mexican. There’s
not even a good soul food place. That bugs me. This Mississippi, and we don’t have a soul
For the majority of black Clarksdalians, the blues revitalization campaign embodied
the worst of both the region’s racial history and its present reality. It was yet a continuation
communities or across a regional block (Ashman 2012; Smith 1984; Squires and Kubrin
2005; Woods 1998). Here, residents had three primary critiques. First, they viewed the
work of a selective group of white elected officials, business owners, and individual
investors with selfish, or otherwise insidious, motivations. Second, residents believed that
black communities had effectively been “left out” of the town’s revitalization efforts. They
claimed that black communities received neither the same degree of public investment nor
an equal distribution of the economic returns as areas serving blues tourism and
development.
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The third, and most common, critique that black residents raised centered on the
apparent failure of white officials and business owners to diversify the ongoing
soul lounge to accompany the multitude of blues clubs and juke joints, or establish a
cultural center to stand alongside the growing cluster of blues museums and
commemoration markers, or add an art showcase to the yearly circuit of blues and music
festivals. Even Clarksdale’s place history need not “depend on the blues.” Instead, black
residents believed that there could be a greater focus on Clarksdale’s food cultures and
Civil Rights history, the latter embodying a spirit of resilience and creativity that, in their
view, was one of the defining characteristics of black communities in the areas.
residents took issue with, they were united in the view that the renewed focus on blues
tourism was merely a continuation of the political, economic, and racial status quo in
Clarksdale: Clarksdale’s tourism infrastructure was not very different from tenant farming
in the early 1900’s or the plantation system before that; the blues was no different from
cotton— white officials in positions of power and profit and black communities relegated
predominantly white group of elected officials, business owners, and investors who they
believed profited most from the blues revitalization campaign and who, with those
interests in mind, committed attention and public investment in areas most directly
serving blues tourism, all while nearby black communities faced continued economic
decline and failing public infrastructure. Amidst these mounting frustrations, black
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residents dispensed with blues tourism not only as a viable solution to the town’s enduring
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Conclusion: “He kept his records by his books.”: A Postdate on the Blues Epistemology
“I don’t like the blues. It saddens me.” Doris King had confessed without hesitation
or misgiving. Then, with a soft air of dismissiveness, she informed me that she had “never
been to a blues show,” at least not to hear the blues. Why would she have? She liked
“Marvin” and “Luther,” Tyrone Davis and “Mom’s Apple Pie”; and she derided the local
blues clubs as “crooked” and “leaning.” Finally, as the conversation shifted to other aspects
of Clarksdale, and to more personal stories from her life, she concluded, “the blues just
In some ways, this is a story about the blues. It is set in Clarksdale, Mississippi, a
town known as the “Home of the Blues,” it explores the making of Clarksdale and the
Mississippi Delta into a “blues place,” and it chronicles how black Clarksdalians like Doris
view the blues—how they define the blues, whether they like and listen to the blues, if and
under what conditions they attend local blues performance scenes, and to what extent they
endorse and support the blues revival playing out both in town and in the Delta region
more broadly.
Yet, if this were the case—that is, if this were a story about the blues—the opening
scene with Doris, or perhaps the leading title, might well be the beginning and end. All but a
handful of the black Clarksdalians that I spoke with insisted that, like Doris, they “did not
like the blues.” They bemoaned and dispensed with a music genre that, in their mind,
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was aesthetically unappealing. It was too slow and repetitive, too simple and sad. Instead,
they had come to prefer the lighter sounds of Betty Wright and Bobby Rush, the call-and-
response of the Brown Sisters and Lee Williams, the yodeling lilts of Sam Cooke and Patti
Labelle, and, for younger residents, the “countrified” bass of Big K.R.I.T. Black residents
were overwhelmingly absent from the local circuit of blues clubs and juke joints, bypassing
Moonies, T-Bone’s, and the Blues Alley for the rap and nightclub scene in Memphis; for
slots, “shooting dice,” and casino shows in Tunica County; or for southern soul concerts on
the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Finally, black residents were both critical and skeptical of the
recent proliferation of blues and heritage tourism sites in the area. They often framed, and
Despite the pretenses of a blues story, however, I Don’t Like the Blues, is only partly
about the blues (I might say that it is not a story about the blues at all). It does not tend to
the music’s origins in the Mississippi Delta, or its evolution from field holler and work song
to Bessie Smith and B.B. King. I did not wish, here, to update the record on black American
music preferences, though I may have accomplished that in a roundabout way, and I have
purposefully avoided any and all references to the blues lyric tradition. That work has been
done, both poorly and reasonably well, in other places (e.g., Barlow 1989; Daley 2003;
Grazian 2005; Gussow 2002; Jones 1963; Palmer 1982). Instead, following an analytic and
interpretive tradition foreshadowed by and embodied in the work of Zora Neale Hurston
and Richard Wright, and later codified in commentary from Leroi Jones and Clyde Woods, I
Don’t Like the Blues positions the blues as muse, metaphor, and framework; indeed, as a
way to explore a broader set of questions, here, about memory, race, and futurism in the
post-Civil Rights rural American South. How do black southerners in the Rural South view
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themselves in relation to the past, both their own personal testimonies and the region’s
place history? How do they negotiate the obstacles and opportunities of the present—an
ongoing structural crisis that continues to promise arrested development and opportunity?
Finally, what futures do they (seek to) imagine for themselves and the people whom they
love? I am positing here that we can address and expand upon these questions—and to any
number of questions related to black (southern) American life—by exploring how black
DOWNBEAT, BACK BEAT: LISTENING FOR THE BLUES, EXPANDING SOCIAL SCIENCE
PARADIGMS
In music composition, the beat keeps time. The downbeat comes first and is often
the most emphasized beat in a song or melody. The offbeat comes next and is somewhat
weaker but still emphasized. The backbeat, however, falls in between. It is present and
silent space. Always, it comprises and completes the song, joining the more present and
As I have mentioned, at various moments in black American culture, the blues has
functioned as the downbeat, the most prominent and emphasized musical and
epistemological sensibility. We might think of this as the Antebellum period, when enslaved
and newly freed black southerners were creating narrative space in blues shouts and
hollers, freedom in blues rhythms, love in the music’s unintelligible spaces. For later
generations, the blues moved to the offbeat. It was still a predominant, or emphasized,
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feature of black American aesthetic culture, but not as central and pronounced as before.
sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and their “migrating cousins” who were revising the blues
for (from) their positions at both the center and margins of Jim Crow terror. I Don’t Like
the Blues posits that for black southerners today—in particular, those straddling
generational lines between pre- and post-Civil Rights, between rhythm, spirit(uals), and
soul—the blues now plays on the backbeat. They situate the blues as an environment of
hardship. They frame the blues as a site of racial meaning and experience, the
and emergent racial realities. Finally, they view the blues as a pathway into the future, one
Memory
Listening for the blues in this way—as deemphasized, but still meaningful and
present in the minds of black Americans—has implications for several paradigms of social
science commentary. First, by defining the blues as a memory of past experience, black
residents are speaking to and against the growing field of social memory studies. Recall
Rick Sutton, for whom my question, “how do you define the blues,” evoked both a fleeting
comment about blues music and a much more vivid account of a time, twenty years prior,
when he was homeless and grieving over a divorce, the death of a friend, and having to
drop out of school. In this way, the blues becomes an environment of memory (Nora 1989;
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Zerubavel 1996)—that is, an epistemological space where individuals (and groups) retell
hardship, they were often accented by gratitude and hopefulness. Whether in still-faced
that they had taken from their blues memories. Rick supplemented his earlier story about
the school bus, what he called the “struggle times,” with a light-hearted reference to playing
outside, or the “high times.” By framing the blues in this way—as something to be
“commemorating,” and “silencing” often used to discuss how individuals and social groups
relate to their pasts. Indeed, when it comes to the blues, black Clarksdalians seem to be
doing something other than merely remembering or silencing. They are at once celebrating
and endeavoring to leave behind. They are, to borrow from Essie Dee, “eating the meat and
Placemaking
Second, in the same way that we might learn about the epistemological contours of
social memory by exploring why black Clarksdalians say they “don’t like the blues,” we
might complicate commentary on black placemaking by considering why they avoid blues
performance scenes. Recall the matter-of-factness with which Twon informed me that
black residents generally do not attend local sites of blues performance before implicitly
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linking this avoidance with the belief that the Blues Alley was “for the white folks.” Here, in
social space—a specific location, in this case the confines of a small club in downtown
While it is likely that black residents never participated in Clarksdale’s local blues
scenes on a wide scale—this, given the relatively recent proliferation of blues tourism
scenes in Clarksdale (post-1980) and the decidedly longer transition in black American
culture away from the blues (post-World War II)—there is no doubt that the racial
dynamics associated with the Blues Alley and downtown square area serve as a
contemporary and continuing impediment. Residents recalled the racial history of the area,
citing the timeless specter of racial segregation, past incidents of racist violence, and,
importantly, the enduring potential of a racist encounter. By linking the blues with
Clarksdale’s racial history and, by extension, reading the blues as a harbinger of the racial
present and future, black residents demonstrate the sophisticated, if mundane and
quotidian, calculations that black (southern) Americans draw on when seeking and making
places where they feel welcomed—or, more aptly, avoiding and unmaking places where
they do not.
Futurism
Finally, I Don’t Like the Blues has argued that by interrogating the extent to which
black Clarksdalians endorse and support the local blues revival we might update and
broaden social science paradigms on how black southerners are seeking to reimagine their
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future. Vera Ann was clear the she was both skeptical and critical of the local blues
revitalization efforts. She questioned the intentions of integrity of the elected officials and
public stakeholders involved, noted the lack of material benefits reaped by black
communities, and bemoaned the overwhelming focus on the blues—even if at the expense
of other possibilities. In this way, black Clarksdalians situated the blues as a site for
“development debate” and futurism, as a domain where they think through the best (and
Clyde Woods (1998) claimed that the blueswomen and men of the Reconstruction
and customs, and summoners of life, love, laughter, and much, much more” (17). Today,
while many of the ways that black southerners relate to the blues has changed, that part
has not.
“Growing up, my uncle Drew would have all these sets of encyclopedias. He had red
ones. He had white ones,” Doris turns to a sturdy bookshelf behind her, tracing her hand
towards a short stack of books near the top. “And, he would keep all of them up on
bookshelves. He would have all these encyclopedias,” she laughs to herself. “And, he kept
his records by his books—Bibles, Sunday church programs—just all of these books by his
blues records.”
Doris had mentioned her uncle R.L. Drew several times already, noting his work
with the NAACP and Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the 1950’s, his vision in
founding King Memorial years before that, and the time he met with Dr. Martin Luther King
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in 1956. However, she seemed most proud to reflect on his work with the United Order of
Friendship, a black credit union that operated in Clarksdale until the 1970’s.
credit. They couldn’t borrow money from banks back then, you see. So, my uncle would
encourage people to invest in encyclopedias to help them with their credit…Sometimes that
I smile, reminded of my time growing up in a small town on the other side of the
state. “I remember my grandmamma used to read the newspaper every day, every morning
with her breakfast…And she had two sets of encyclopedias!” Doris has jogged my memory.
“Two sets!”
Doris smirks at my greenness, or perhaps at her own passing thought. “Oh, my uncle
loved his encyclopedias. He would give them as gifts, and he would always ask me, ‘would
At this point, Doris is lost in her own thoughts, her face fixed with an enduring
smirk. “His thing was that reading was how you got to a full life.”
As midday approaches, a thin ray of sunlight falls across Doris’s desk, stopping just
before reaching the base of the bookshelf in the corner. I look up at the encyclopedias—
about six of them, not a full set—the torn binding visible even from my seat several paces
away. “And, you kept these all that time,” I ask, my voice falling just above the quiet of the
room.
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Appendix: Off Beats: Epistemology, Methodology, Methods, and Data
I Don’t Like the Blues draws on the epistemological, technical, and stylistic
foundations of folk and cultural ethnography. To this end, while designing and conducting
this study, I referenced earlier ethnographic works such as Zora Neale Hurston’s Of Mules
and Men (Hurston 2008 [1935]) and Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), Elijah Anderson’s Code
of the Street (1999) and Cosmopolitan Canopy (2011), and, more recently, Zandria
Robinson’s This Ain’t Chicago (2014). Consistent with these studies, as well as the general
become socially immersed in everyday cultural and civic life in Clarksdale. With this goal in
mind, I structured the study around three data collection techniques—in-depth interviews,
general and focused field observations, and recurrent participant observation. Because I
also had questions about the structural profile and historical background of the study area,
defined broadly to include Clarksdale, Coahoma County, and the Central Mississippi Delta
and the community study tradition (e.g., W. E. B Du Bois 1899; Duncan 2014; Hunter 2013).
aforementioned data collection techniques and provide an overview and context of the data
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included in analysis. I begin with a chronological account of my time in the field. While I
include some discussion of the full arch of this project—from July 2014 to present—I focus
particular attention on the 16 months between July 2014 and November 2015 when I was
TIMELINE
July 2014
I entered the field with the early goal of observing community life as what I
“student working on a project for school,” and a “student interested in inequality in the
South.” On the other, I did not actively seek study participants. I knew I would eventually
meet dozens, probably hundreds, of residents, and I expected that I would be able to recruit
at least a few of them to talk with me on the record. Thus, early on, instead of immediately
beginning to enlist study participants for interviews, I sought to “get a feel” for daily
community life in Clarksdale. Where did people work and go to church? When and where
did they buy groceries? Where were the most frequented convenience stores? Where did
young people meet in their downtime? What did people do on the weekend? With these
and other questions in mind, I set out during the first month of fieldwork to observe
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community life wherever community life was happening. I found a barber. I attended
church and joined a gym. I patronized local businesses and bought produce from local
farmers. I subscribed to the newspaper and spent time on the downtown square. I went to
Ground Zero and Red’s, Moonies and Delta Brook. In my first week, I attended the “National
Night Out Against Crime,” a rally meant to engender trust in law enforcement and exhibit
new police equipment. In my second week, I spent time at the Sunflower River Gospel and
Blues Festival. On Saturdays, I got familiar with the blackjack tables at the nearby casinos.
I also took the first month of fieldwork to develop a system for collecting and
curating archival data. Here, I wanted to piece together a general structural profile of the
study area. How many people lived in Clarksdale? Coahoma County? What were the largest
and fastest-growing job sectors? How had the town’s demographic profile changed over the
years? What had civic life been like in the 1970’s? the 1990’s? What had residents
expressed concerns about over the years? What were they happy with? To address these
questions, I sought a variety of data types. I combed the Minnesota Population Center’s
Microdata Series (IPUMS-USA) for Census data. I was generally interested in any available
demographic indicators for the years between 1970 and the most recent Decennial Census.
I began visiting the town’s local archives, housed in the Carnegie Public Library. I also took
this time to begin collecting and curating print and digital copies of the local newspaper,
audio files of news podcasts and local radio broadcasts, and handbills and fliers from
around town.
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August 2014
observations of community life and collect demographic and archival data, I became more
in Mississippi and was able to meet several study participants because they knew people
who knew people who knew me. Second, I was intentional about talking to people when I
was conducting initial field observations. Whether strolling through the downtown area
during the week or visiting one of the late-summer music festivals on weekends, I made a
concerted effort to greet passersby and, when appropriate, introduce myself. Essentially, I
began treating my daily rounds and even the most routine interactions as (possible)
other times more dispassionate greetings and dismissals. Third, and of some surprise to
me, I was often on the receiving end of happenstance introductions and requests to talk
about what had “brought me to the area.” For example, during my first visit to Delta Brook,
the restaurant where I had spoken with Big Danny and Kathereen, a server greeted me
with a casual, “you must be new around here? I haven’t seen you before.” The ensuing
conversation led to my being introduced to several other servers and a few of the
restaurants “regulars,” many of whom subsequently agreed to sit for interviews. This
approach proved to be one of the most effective means of early participant recruitment,
and is worthy of further comment later (see “Researcher Reflexivity” section below).
Finally, as the study progressed and the pool of respondents grew, I employed progressive
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“snowball sampling” methods, in which I asked respondents to identify, and in some cases
September 2014
By the end of my second month in the field, I had a growing roster of potential
respondents—I had gotten contact information from fifty people and spoken to dozens
more—and had completed 12 interviews. These early interviews were all unstructured
format. Still, I spoke with these individuals on the record with the general goal of building
rapport, expanding my pool of respondents, and gathering information about the study site
In the third and fourth months of fieldwork, I expanded my focus from general
observations of community life and collecting and organizing archival data to more focused
focused on “youth enrichment.” I made it a point to volunteer twice weekly, whether that
included helping with homework and guided reading or joining in the making of s’mores
and cupcakes. During this time, I also began working at an area elementary school, an
opportunity that came about through a previous acquaintance in the study area. In
particular, noting my interest in inequality and daily community life, I was offered the
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opportunity to work as a long-term substitute teacher. With some reluctance—I was
unsure of the time demands and, honestly, of my capacity to teach students—I agreed. For
the next nine weeks (October-December), I taught two third grade classrooms, a total of 39
students. I wrote lesson plans, attended faculty meetings, led parent-teacher conferences,
attended faculty and student birthday parties, and met with parents about student
progress reports, report cards, and, in one case, a disciplinary issue. I informed all of my
easier to explain to them that I was “in college”—“studying inequality in the Delta.” In
general, my goal during this time was to meet and build rapport with more residents.
gleaned from these and other data that I had collected (interviews and observations as well
as demographic and archival data). Whereas my initial interview schedule had included a
battery of general questions about social life and civic institutions in the area, this updated
draft included more pointed inquiries. For example, the prompt, “Tell me about the school
system in Clarksdale. Do you have any children enrolled? What have been your experiences
with (his/her/their) teachers? School Administrators?” became, “I hear that there are four
high schools in Clarksdale—Clarksdale High School, Coahoma County High School (“The
County”), Coahoma Agricultural High School (“Aggie”), and Lee Academy. What can you tell
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me about those schools? Who are the students that attend those schools?” The updated
interview schedule also included several questions focused on blues music, local blues
clubs and entertainment venues, and the town’s/region’s “blues revival.” Before this point,
while I had taken note of the blues as a recurrent theme, I had not incorporated a set of
dedicated interview questions with a blues focus. With a few minor modifications, I used
the revised interview transcript for the following five months (January 2015-May 2015) for
a total of 78 interviews with 56 new respondents. Thus, by the end of May 2015, I had
work in The Philadelphia Negro and Elijah Anderson’s work in The Cosmopolitan Canopy, I
possible. I thought first that Google Images/Street View Maps might serve this purpose well
(i.e., I could simply capture and curate images from online), but I quickly found the content
to be quite dated. The maps showed several businesses that were closed, houses that had
become vacated or, worse, were no longer standing, and a cotton gin that had long been
demolished. Related, the maps were missing several new businesses on State Street and the
downtown square, and an entire block of homes in the Snob Hill community that had
recently been built. With these considerations in mind, I commenced with daily
along every street in town documenting virtually every drivable space in town with
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February – November 2015
explicit attention to the racial composition and modes of interaction in public spaces,
whether a blues festival or a restaurant. I also found both comfort and anxiety in knowing I
could expect to see at least one or two previous acquaintances during my time in public
spaces around time. These interactions often turned into extended conversations and, in
many cases, informal interviews. These observations and interactions took place at local
attended two candlelight vigils, both tributes to homicide victims. I attended the holiday
two dozen “key respondents.” I joined them on weekend outings, to a nearby nightclub or
the casinos. I sat through busking sessions, guitar lessons, and midnight performances with
weekly visits to several high schools in rural Coahoma County. I went to PTA meetings,
By the time I withdrew from the field in November of 2015, I had completed 147
interviews with 113 residents. Since then (November 2015-present), I have returned to the
field more than two dozen times, both to attend various social events and to talk with
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residents. While these follow-up visits were mostly informal, off-the-record conversations
with key respondents, I did conduct formal interviews with 14 additional residents.
Researcher Reflexivity
encounter that I had while conducting fieldwork for this project. For instance, being a
native Mississippian provided native and long-term residents with a point of commonality
started conversations about black southern cooking (e.g., Essie Dee), church, local high
school sports, state politics, and more. Being an able-bodied, young, apparently
heterosexual black native Mississippian no doubt helped engender relationships with other
spaces like the gym or a pickup basketball game, or extended interactions like my trip to
the casino with Twon. Being a graduate student at a recognizable southern university
with public officials and local stakeholders. In my conversation with mayor Carl White, my
reference to the University of North Carolina prompted a round of stories and laughter
discussion of methodology in two ways. First, they illuminate the important role that my
identity and background played in participant recruitment and, thus, the overall structure
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and progression of this study. I was able to gain access to spaces/places, and gain consent
from and grow rapport with respondents based on some aspect or intersecting aspects of
(Blumer 1969; Grbich 2013; Mead 1934), which holds that knowledge, truth, and reality
are both subjective and relational. As such, the observations and interviews that comprise
the research process are better thought of as hubs in which multiple subjectivities act on
and through one another to generate new meaning, as opposed to discrete nodes of facts or
researcher to always critically and actively assess and challenge her or his own perspective,
preferences, and blind spots. Here, a number of sociologists have argued for the importance
of making this introspective process bright and apparent, not dampened or silent (Bettie
2003; Grbich 2013; Prus 1995). This is a call for researcher reflexivity. Bettie (2003) notes
as much:
I sought to reckon with how my power and privileges might be influencing data collection
(as well as analysis and presentation) by regularly reflecting on interviews and field
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experiences. To this end, I kept copious, detailed notes and “notes on notes” (Kleinman and
Copp 1993) not only about what questions I was asking, but also about how I was asking
them; not only about what respondents were saying in response, but also about how they
were responding, and what they were doing while they were responding. I tried to be
DATA
In total, this study relies on five types of data: (1) interviews, (2) general and
focused field observations, (3) demographic data, (4) archival data and (5) a range of
supplementary data types, including content from social and public media, and print
Interviews
Over the course of the study, I curated a “roster” with the names and contact
information for nearly 300 residents. Of these, I conducted 161 interviews with 127
residents. I distinguish between two types of interviews. First, “formal” interviews include
predetermined interview schedule or from memory. These interviews lasted between one
and four hours (70 minutes on average) and typically took place between myself and only
one other resident. While all formal interviews were captured using a standard voice
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recorder, there were eight instances where transcription was not possible (i.e., damaged or
lost audio files). In total, I conducted 105 formal interviews with 72 residents.
not previously sat for formal interviews. I define informal interviews as non-tape-recorded,
extended conversations, typically of more than 20 minutes in length, during which I asked
questions or exchanged ideas about a topic with one or more residents (e.g., Recall my
conversation with Vera Ann at the convenience story). Such conversations were counted as
an “informal interview” only if I gained verbal consent from the interviewee(s) and was
able to transcribe the interview via voice, typed, or handwritten notes on the day of its
occurrence.
Of the 127 residents that I interviewed, 101 were black—55 women and 46 men; 24
were white—14 women and 10 men; and 2 identified as multi-racial—both women. Most
were native (n=86) residents or had been living in Clarksdale for ten-plus years (n=12). I
refer to the latter as “long-term” residents. Twenty-two residents had been living in the
Clarksdale for between four and ten years (i.e., “short-term” residents). The remaining
seven respondents either had lived in the area for fewer than four years, moved to the area
with the expressed intent of staying for only a short time, or were tourists. Interviewees
ranged in age from 8 to 71 years of age, though most were between 25-58 (39 years of age
on average).
As I have mentioned, the analytic focus of this study centers on black residents who
had lived in Clarksdale long enough to have witnessed, or had close secondhand
knowledge, of the town’s transition to the post-Civil Rights era, which I defined, roughly, as
the 10-year period between 1964 and 1974 (i.e., when the city schools were integrating).
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As such, I focus particular attention on black native and long-term residents who were at
least 35 years old at the time of the study. These specifications brought the working
analytic sample for the study to 68 residents (37 black women; 31 black men). These
respondents ranged in age from 35 to 71 years old, though only two were older than 60 (48
years of age on average). All but seven of these respondents were native residents, and
three of the four long-term residents had been living in Clarksdale for more than 40 years
(including Doris King and Auntie). Interviews with respondents in the analytic sample
Observations
I recorded general and participant observations in several ways. Most of the time, I
took handwritten notes in a small journal or notebook that I carried with me; I used talk-to-
text, note-taking, and messaging apps on my phone (often while driving to, from, or
between observations); and/or I typed notes directly into a running word document on my
laptop. At the end of each day, I referenced these notes and wrote a (semi) coherent field
note. If I could not use any of these methods without it being apparent that I was taking
notes, I waited until I was able settle into a location with more privacy and record notes
from memory. In total I wrote nearly 500 field notes ranging in length from 500 to 2,500
words.
Each week I also wrote a series of “reflection memos” in which I compiled field notes
that had some uniting theme. For instance, I used some memos to reflect on everything that
I had observed while driving in Clarksdale over a specified timespan. I used others to
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reflect on a specific event or series of events. In all cases, reflection memos differed from
field notes in that I was more attentive to how I felt and what I was thinking (while field
notes were focused more heavily on what was happening). This in line with Kleinman’s
(1993) cautions about the role of emotions in data collection and analysis. I also wrote
“analytic memos” once every few weeks (no less frequently than once a month). In these, I
situated my personal reflections, observations, and other data (e.g., interviews, readings,
news stories) within the theoretical and analytical structure of the project.
Beyond field notes and memos, I also captured many of my observations with
photographs and video footage. In general, I limited photos and video footage to public
settings and outside structures. In total, I have more than 200 video clips and 15,000
photographs. The purpose of these photographs, thus reflected in the extraordinarily high
topographical and built environment. Each photo has a unique ID and is paired with a field
note with written commentary on the observation. Where applicable, photos are also
tagged with a geo code (Census Tract-Block Group-Block) and linked with field notes from
other observations in the study area. In all, I logged more than 6,000 hours of observational
data.
Census
neighborhood. First, Table 1 shows six panels of demographic indicators for the “Central
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Delta Region.” As I discuss in footnote 6, I defined the Central Delta region using the 11-
county designation put forth by Reinschmiedt and Green (1989). This includes the
Sunflower, Tallahatchie, Tunica, and Washington. The data displayed in Table 1 were
calculated as follows: I compiled information for the eleven indicated counties individually
and aggregated (summed or averaged, where appropriate) up. For instance, the
“Population (Total)” of the Central Delta region represents the aggregated total of the
“Population (Total)” for the eleven included counties. All percentages are averages for the
eleven included counties. Data spanning 1970-1990 were assembled from the Minnesota
Population Center’s National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS). Data for
2000 and 2010 come from the U.S. Decennial Census (pulled via the American Fact Finder),
and 2013 figures were derived from the American Community Survey (ibid).
In general, the data in Tables 2 and 3, for Coahoma County and Clarksdale
respectively, were curated following the conventions used in Table 1, save the need to
Finally, and largely in response to early interviews and observations, I sought a way
to calculate demographic characteristics at the neighborhood level. Thus, while Tables 1-3
rely on County- and City-level data, Tables 4-10 draw from Census Tract- and Block-Group-
Level Data. This practice of pairing more micro-level spatial designations with Census data
follows the practices of a number of social science researchers, especially those interested
employed by David Harding (2010) in Living the Drama. However, where Harding was
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grouping of Census Tracts or Block Groups), I was most interested in the demographic
To accomplish this, I included the following question in all interviews: “Did the
neighborhood where you grew up have a name or a nickname?” This question was meant
and sometimes aggressively, that there were. I then asked respondents if they knew of
other neighborhood names or nicknames beyond their own. Again, with very little
Brickyard,” “(Black) Downtown,” “Oakhurst,” “Snob Hill,” “The Roundyard,” and “Riverton.”
With a bit more variance, respondents also named “The Tennessee Williams District.” I
heard this latter designation most often from older residents and white residents. As the
these neighborhoods, in some cases, presenting them with maps of Clarksdale, and in
around these seven neighborhoods with only minor overlap and very few blind spots (see
Figure 2). With exceptions along pockets of the periphery, every neighborhood block in
town was accounted for. I then mapped these socially-defined neighborhood boundaries
onto Census-defined Tract-block group dyads. For example, the neighborhood that
residents referred to as “Oakhurst” corresponded to the following six Census block groups
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in 2013—Census Tract (CT) 9504-Block Group (BG) 3; CT 9504-BG 4; CT 9505-BG 1,
to each CT-BG dyad and aggregated (or averaged) up. This process, though tedious, was
surprisingly straightforward, with one exception: between 1990 and 2013, the Census
added, combined, and eliminated some CT-BG dyads. For instance, while Oakhurst
corresponded to the same five CT-BG configurations at panels 2013, 2010, and 2000, it
included six CT-BG dyads in 1990. Here, I cross-referenced each panel with my own sketch
of the neighborhoods.
Archival
While conducting fieldwork, I collected print and/or digital copes of every article,
including letters to the editor, from Clarksdale’s primary newspaper since 2005. I filed
by year, month, and week of first release. I supplemented local newspapers with more than
200 newspaper and magazine articles, profiles, and feature stories from larger
publications, including the Jackson, Mississippi Clarion Ledger, the New York Times, the
Washington Post, the The Economist, and more. During analysis, I read every article of the
local newspaper that overlapped with my time in the field as well as the 200 or so articles
from state and national publications. While I read many of the local write-ups that
preceded my arrival in the field in July 2014, I found keyword searches to more effective
here.
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Supplemental
While the bulk of the analysis offered here relies on the aforementioned interview,
observational, demographic, and archival data, I also drew from a number of other data
Archival Interviews
conducted personally, this analysis benefitted both directly (see Aaron Henry quote on p.
103) and indirectly from interview transcripts collected from the Civil Rights Movement in
Mississippi collection (23 audio files and transcripts) at the University of Southern
Mississippi; the Southern Regional Council: Will the Circle Be Unbroken oral history
interviews transcripts only) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and the
interviews were conducted between 1972 and 1996 and include residents and Civil Rights
organizers who were either native residents of Clarksdale or Coahoma County, or who had
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I also drew on about 50 videos published to the local newspaper’s YouTube channel.
These videos included announcements and speeches made by the mayor as well as video
documentation of weekly city council meetings and other events around town. I tagged
each video clip with a unique ID and paired it with a field note or memo describing the
content of the clip. Where applicable, I also tagged videos with a geo code (Census Tract-
downloaded 21 audio files of a weekly news podcast produced and curated by the local
ANALYSIS
Consistent with the basic tenets of qualitative research, much of my data were
stored as textual files. Observations became field notes, early thoughts about the project
became memos, and, of course, interviews became transcripts. To this latter point, I
listened to every interview that I conducted at least twice and did a partial or complete
transcription of all interviews with the 68 residents in the analytic sample. Including
based (i.e., Atlas.TI for Mac) and manual analytic techniques (Charmaz 2003; Glaser 1992;
Glaser and Strauss 1967). Coding and categorizing data is a fundamental element of
grounded theory. This process calls for the use of descriptive words and phrases to be
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appended to words or passages of data. These codes are then analyzed for patterns and
themes that offer meaningful insight to the researcher. Rather than confining coding
processes to a discrete stage of data analysis after all data were collected, I began analyzing
data concurrently with the earliest period of data collection. This approach, another tenet
of grounded theory (Glaser 1992), enables emergent themes to inform both processes of
inductive theory building and subsequent study design (Charmaz 2003). This approach is
At each stage of analysis, I began with multiple iterations of “open coding,” in which
I labeled each line of data with a short, “descriptor” code (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 2011;
Saldańa 2012). These descriptive codes became the basis for “meaning units,” defined as
blocks of text that convey a general descriptive or interpretive point. Following open
coding, I re-read interview transcripts with a focus on grouping meaning units into larger
thematic categories based on their theoretical and pragmatic relationships. Then, guided by
the interview schedule, emergent patterns in the data, and coding/analysis memos, I
grouped thematic categories into broader meta-themes aimed at making inferences about
the data, or, when appropriate, making addendums to the techniques used during data
collection.
The former assesses similarities and differences between two or more cases or categories
and is typically determined by comparing and contrasting elements and themes (Maxwell
and Miller 2008). Contiguous relationship types more directly account for the time order of
participants, primarily through the use of data matrices that cross-classified meaning units,
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thematic categories, and meta-themes. To assess contiguous relationships, I wrote and
coded narrative profiles for a majority of the respondents in my analytic sample (Elliott
2005; Grbich 2012), including all respondents referenced in this dissertation. These
adolescence as well as major life events like educational transitions, from high school to
college for example; marriage; divorce; and parenthood. Narrative profiles helped re-orient
data that were not chronologically ordered such that correlated attributes were more
evident
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Tables
Table 1. Selected Demographic Characteristics for the eleven “Central” Counties of the Mississippi Delta, 1970-2013
Demographics 2013 2010 2000 1990 1980 1970
Population (Total) 220,664 223,276 260,855 266,656 295,449 312,950
Change (since previous panel) -1.17% -14.41% -2.18% -9.75% -5.59% N/A
Change (since 1970) -29.49% -28.65% -16.65% -14.79% -5.59% N/A
Children (<18 years old) 58,334 59,636 79,942 89,631 108,820 135,833
Elderly (>65 Years old) 26,918 26,507 29,869 34,671 36,425 32,038
Family Households 50,890 53,782 62,660 63,127 67,990 91,850
Race/Ethnicity
Non-Hispanic White (Total) 59,653 60,569 81,696 99,704 114,607 122,770
Change (since previous panel) -1.51% -25.86% -18.06% -13.00% -6.65% N/A
Change (since 1970) -51.41% -50.66% -33.46% -18.79% -6.65% N/A
Non-Hispanic Black (Total) 153,767 156,059 173,361 164,167 175,783 188,754
Change (since previous panel) -1.47% -9.98% 5.60% -6.61% -6.87% N/A
Change (since 1970) -18.54% -17.32% -8.16% -13.03% -6.87% N/A
Non-Hispanic Asian (Total) 1,124 1,080 1,203 831 1,157 UA
Non-Hispanic Other (Total) 1,371 1,545 1,454 226 263 UA
Hispanic/Latino (Total) 4,749 4,023 3,141 1,728 3,639 UA
Sex
Male (Total) 106,568 107,831 124,767 124,910 140,124 150,068
Female (Total) 114,096 115,445 136,088 141,746 155,325 162,882
Socioeconomic Status
Aggregate Poverty 36.78% 35.37% 32.69% 40.79% 38.70% 46.87%
Child Poverty 52.53% 50.69% 43.41% 53.08% 49.83% 61.71%
White Aggregate Poverty 12.80% 12.52% 11.05% 11.51% 12.67% 14.57%
Black Aggregate Poverty 45.95% 44.82% 43.03% 58.09% 55.78% 68.06%
Sources: U.S. Census, 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010; ACS 2008-2013 (5-year estimates)
Note: UA, Data Unavailable
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Table 2. Selected Demographic Characteristics for Coahoma County, Mississippi 1970-2013
Demographics 2013 2010 2000 1990 1980 1970
Population (Total) 25,815 26,151 30,622 31,665 36,918 40,447
Change (since previous panel) -1.28% -14.60% -3.29% -14.23% -8.72% N/A
Change (since 1970) -36.18% -35.35% -24.29% -21.71% -8.72% N/A
Children (<18 years old) 7,457 7,664 10,098 10,814 13,671 17,703
Elderly (>65 Years old) 3,198 3,184 3,778 4,496 4,825 4,462
Family Households 6,470 6,393 7,479 7,538 8,484 8,846
Race/Ethnicity
Non-Hispanic White (Total) 5,854 5,918 8,898 10,933 13,016 14,232
Change (since previous panel) -1.08% -33.49% -18.61% -16.00% -8.54% N/A
Change (since 1970) -58.87% -58.42% -37.48% -23.18% -8.54% N/A
Non-Hispanic Black (Total) 19,614 19,698 21,099 20,335 23,306 26,013
Change (since previous panel) -0.43% -6.64% 3.76% -12.75% -10.41% N/A
Change (since 1970) -24.60% -24.28% -18.89% -21.83% -10.41% N/A
Non-Hispanic Asian (Total) 40 114 143 105 151 N/A
Non-Hispanic Other (Total) 171 128 206 21 18 202
Hispanic/Latino (Total) 136 293 276 271 427 UA
Sex
Male (Total) 11,873 12,003 14,065 14,412 17,292 19,096
Female (Total) 13,942 14,148 16,557 17,253 19,626 21,351
Socioeconomic Status
Aggregate Poverty 38.20% 35.50% 35.80% 44.20% 39.82% 49.38%
Child Poverty 53.45% 54.10% 45.88% 56.93% 51.80% 63.38%
White Aggregate Poverty 9.72% 12.10% 11.50% 11.68% 9.17% 9.66%
Black Aggregate Poverty 46.51% 43.10% 46.05% 62.34% 57.75% 71.36%
Sources: U.S. Census, 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010; ACS 2008-2013 (5-year estimates)
Note: UA, Data Unavailable
160
Table 3. Selected Demographic Characteristics for Clarksdale, Mississippi, 1970-2013
Demographics 2013 2010 2000 1990 1980 1970
Population (Total) 17,725 17,962 20,645 19,717 21,137 21,673
Change (since previous panel) -1.32% -13.00% 4.71% -6.72% -2.47% N/A
Change (since 1970) -18.22% -17.12% -4.74% -9.03% -2.47% N/A
Children (<18 years old) 5,471 5,493 6,795 6,565 7,466 8,776
Elderly (>65 Years old) 2,239 2,202 2,671 3,029 2,966 2,465
Family Households 4,454 4,346 5,071 4,728 5,017 4,978
Race/Ethnicity
Non-Hispanic White (Total) 3,332 3,460 6,135 7,360 7,960 9,840
- -
Change (since previous panel) -3.70% -43.60% -7.54% N/A
16.64% 19.11%
- - -
Change (since 1970) -66.14% -64.84% N/A
37.65% 25.20% 19.11%
Non-Hispanic Black (Total) 14,135 14,140 14,105 12,117 12,872 11,703
Change (since previous panel) -0.04% 0.25% 16.41% -5.87% 9.99% N/A
Change (since 1970) 20.78% 20.82% 20.52% 3.54% 9.99% N/A
Non-Hispanic Asian (Total) 35 98 120 81 116 N/A
Non-Hispanic Other (Total) 164 96 151 14 11 130
Hispanic/Latino (Total) 59 168 134 145 178 UA
Sex
Male (Total) 7,962 8,065 9,286 8,835 9,706 10,000
Female (Total) 9,763 9,897 11,359 10,882 11,431 11,673
Socioeconomic Status
Aggregate Poverty 40.86% 35.83% 36.25% 41.51% 35.27% 35.41%
Child Poverty 56.11% 56.36% 46.34% 52.84% 46.20% 49.51%
White Aggregate Poverty 9.87% 10.48% 12.27% 10.96% 8.09% 7.27%
Black Aggregate Poverty 47.86% 42.40% 46.29% 60.36% 52.54% 59.16%
Sources: U.S. Census, 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010; ACS 2008-2013 (5-year estimates)
Note: UA, Data Unavailable
161
Table 4. Selected Demographic Characteristics for the “Oakhurst” Neighborhood, 1990-2013
Demographics 2013 2010 2000 1990
Population (Total) 6,095 6,551 6,477 6,100
Change (since previous panel) -6.96% 1.14% 6.18% N/A
Change (since 1990) -0.08% 7.39% 6.18% N/A
Sources: U.S. Census, 1990, 2000, 2010; ACS 2008-2013 (5-year estimates)
Note: UA, Data Unavailable
162
Table 5. Selected Demographic Characteristics for the “Black Downtown” Neighborhood, 1990-2013
Demographics 2013 2010 2000 1990
Population (Total) 694 697 1,183 1,725
Change (since previous panel) -0.43% -41.08% -31.42% N/A
Change (since 1990) -59.77% -59.59% -31.42% N/A
Sources: U.S. Census, 1990, 2000, 2010; ACS 2008-2013 (5-year estimates)
Note: UA, Data Unavailable
163
Table 6. Selected Demographic Characteristics for the “Snob Hill” Neighborhood, 1990-2013
Demographics 2013 2010 2000 1990
Population (Total) 1,795 1,963 1,341 1,270
Change (since previous panel) -8.56% 46.38% 5.59% N/A
Change (since 1990) 41.34% 54.57% 5.59% N/A
Sources: U.S. Census, 1990, 2000, 2010; ACS 2008-2013 (5-year estimates)
Note: UA, Data Unavailable
164
Table 7. Selected Demographic Characteristics for the “Brickyard” Neighborhood, 1990-2013
Demographics 2013 2010 2000 1990
Population (Total) 6,158 6,151 7,495 8,090
Change (since previous panel) 0.11% -17.93% -7.35% N/A
Change (since 1990) -23.88% -23.97% -7.35% N/A
Sources: U.S. Census, 1990, 2000, 2010; ACS 2008-2013 (5-year estimates)
Note: UA, Data Unavailable
165
Table 8. Selected Demographic Characteristics for the “Riverton” Neighborhood, 1990-2013
Demographics 2013 2010 2000 1990
Population (Total) 1,853 1,707 2,189 2,340
Change (since previous panel) 8.55% -22.02% -6.45% N/A
Change (since 1990) -20.81% -27.05% -6.45% N/A
Sources: U.S. Census, 1990, 2000, 2010; ACS 2008-2013 (5-year estimates)
Note: UA, Data Unavailable
166
Table 9. Selected Demographic Characteristics for the “Roundyard” Neighborhood, 1990-2013
Demographics 2013 2010 2000 1990
Population (Total) 575 504 734 735
Change (since previous panel) 14.09% -31.34% -0.14% N/A
Change (since 1990) -21.77% -31.43% -0.14% N/A
Sources: U.S. Census, 1990, 2000, 2010; ACS 2008-2013 (5-year estimates)
Note: UA, Data Unavailable
167
Table 10. Selected Demographic Characteristics for the “Tennessee Williams District” Neighborhood, 1990-2013
Demographics 2013 2010 2000 1990
Population (Total) 794 518 926 790
Change (since previous panel) 53.28% -44.06% 17.22% N/A
Change (since 1990) 0.51% -34.43% 17.22% N/A
Sources: U.S. Census, 1990, 2000, 2010; ACS 2008-2013 (5-year estimates)
Note: UA, Data Unavailable
168
Figures
169
170
Figure 2. Map of Clarksdale, Mississippi, With Neighborhood Districts Notated
Note: The green line indicates tracks of Illinois Central Railroad.
Map data © 2017 Google
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